'Deals with a group of long-lost Scottish adventurers whose self-contained community, Columba, has been isolated from the wider world in a remote valley since 1745, allowing them to develop a radically alternative society [...] The chief distinguishing feature of Columba is its fostering of the practice of handfasting, a custom allowing trial marriages of a year and a day.'
Source: Strange Constellations: A History of Australian Science Fiction.
'Paradoxically, Australian nationalist accounts have tended to slight the earliest Australian literature by white settlers from the nineteenth century. This chapter surveys the literary history of this period, examining writers such as Oliné Keese, Ada Cambridge, Henry Kingsley, Rosa Praed, and Catherine Helen Spence. Drawing connections between these writers and the transnational Anglophone literary world centering on Great Britain and the United States, this chapter takes a comparative perspective that at once acknowledges the peripheral standing of these Australian texts and argues for their relevance to the history of the novel in English.' (Publication abstract)
'Catherine Helen Spence presents the fictional lost colony as a utopian space for the radical feminist transformation of marriage and the state. Her settlers have intermarried with an indigenous group and reinvented marriage to include a probationary period of 'handfasting' where couples live as if married for a year and a day before deciding whether they wish to confirm their relationships more permanently with marriage. Though too early to be considered a 'New Woman' novel, Handfasted positions its brand of feminism with many of the discursive strategies that late nineteenth-century New Women novelists used, including the argument that women's rights and sexual freedom would help Anglo-Saxon women act as nation and empire builders. Greater Britain offers an important theoretical lens for the novel as a whole and for Spence's brand of feminism. Dilke's Greater Britain continues, saying that America offers the English race the moral directorship of the globe, by ruling mankind through Saxon institutions and the English tongue.'
Source: Abstract.
'Australian culture is frequently described as materialistic, hedonistic and fun-loving, and no doubt it is, in some respects, all those things. The 'land of the long week-end', its 'great stupor' perhaps, even the 'lucky country' - all these more or less flattering tags suggest, sometimes in the face of what their authors intended, that nothing can go seriously wrong in Australia, where life cannot be but easy-going and enjoyable. And so it would appear that, as Craig McGregor observed, 'the Australian race is engaged in a whole-hearted pursuit of happiness without guilt. The beach, in particular, has been for several decades one of the major symbols of the Australian way of life, the locus of Australian hedonism, where people worship the sun, display their near-naked bodies, and ogle other people's...' (p. 81)
'Australian culture is frequently described as materialistic, hedonistic and fun-loving, and no doubt it is, in some respects, all those things. The 'land of the long week-end', its 'great stupor' perhaps, even the 'lucky country' - all these more or less flattering tags suggest, sometimes in the face of what their authors intended, that nothing can go seriously wrong in Australia, where life cannot be but easy-going and enjoyable. And so it would appear that, as Craig McGregor observed, 'the Australian race is engaged in a whole-hearted pursuit of happiness without guilt. The beach, in particular, has been for several decades one of the major symbols of the Australian way of life, the locus of Australian hedonism, where people worship the sun, display their near-naked bodies, and ogle other people's...' (p. 81)
