Issue Details: First known date: 1997... 1997 Excavating Historical Guilt and Moral Failure in 'Remembering Babylon' : An Exploration of the Faultlines in White Australian Identity
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Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Commonwealth Commonwealth : Essays and Studies vol. 19 no. 2 Spring 1997 Z920961 1997 periodical issue 1997 pg. 77-99

Works about this Work

David Malouf's Haunted Writing Colette Selles , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: Postcolonial Ghosts 2010; (p. 269-285)
'The two novels this paper focuses on, Remembering Babylon and The Conversations at Curlow Creek, testify to David Malouf's ongoing 'dialogue with Australia'. Published in 1993 and 1996, two centuries after the arrival of the First Fleet of convicts, they engage with crucial issues in a postcolonial Australia which still has to negotiate its existential uncertainty. By returning to the first half of the nineteenth century, the narratives face the ghosts of the past which have haunted Australia, notably the stain of its origins as a penal colony: a sense of exile to the edge of the world is combined with the legacy of historical wrongs, the atrocities of the convict system and the devastating impact of colonization on the Aboriginal peoples - from dispossession to massacre or assimilationist policies which have engendered social alienation and spiritual dislocation.' (p. 270)
David Malouf's Haunted Writing Colette Selles , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: Postcolonial Ghosts 2010; (p. 269-285)
'The two novels this paper focuses on, Remembering Babylon and The Conversations at Curlow Creek, testify to David Malouf's ongoing 'dialogue with Australia'. Published in 1993 and 1996, two centuries after the arrival of the First Fleet of convicts, they engage with crucial issues in a postcolonial Australia which still has to negotiate its existential uncertainty. By returning to the first half of the nineteenth century, the narratives face the ghosts of the past which have haunted Australia, notably the stain of its origins as a penal colony: a sense of exile to the edge of the world is combined with the legacy of historical wrongs, the atrocities of the convict system and the devastating impact of colonization on the Aboriginal peoples - from dispossession to massacre or assimilationist policies which have engendered social alienation and spiritual dislocation.' (p. 270)
Last amended 9 May 2014 10:15:51
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