Cirrus@Austlit

'In the Macleay Museum at the University of Sydney a serendipitous variety of Victorian curiosities are brought. together from many private collections. Amongst them is a small card with a sample of white fabric attached. It is a piece of muslin, made from cotton grown in Australia, spun in Manchester, and woven in Dacca, dated "c. 1850." What it indicates is the complex network of colonial production that was already outsourcing and modularising long before the word "globalisation" had been thought of. Bringing this item together with an equally curious "museum piece" of Australian literature (the Indian stories of Ethel Anderson) points up some of the limitations of previous constructions of literary histories, not just those standard narratives of the spread of (and assimilation to) Empire culture, but also the nationalist counter-stories of a separate and different emergence of an autonomous cultural identity.'

 (Introduction)