'As a writer, a reader and a migrant, I am interested in the gaps in migration narratives and in where the stories touch other stories. These features suggest the difficulty of capturing the enormity of the migrational shift in one narrative and offer a sense of the nuances contained within a single person's experiences of migration. In this article I explore some ways in which individual migration stories have similar fragmented structures and make dynamic connections to wider stories, using examples from my own and other Australian fiction.'
In addition to her own work, Sibyl's Cave, Padmore refers to Eva Sallis's Hiam (1998), Arnold Zable's Cafe Scheherazade (2001), Peter Lyssiotis and Nick Petroulias's 'New Troy' (2000) and Rosa Cappiello's Oh, Lucky Country [Paese Fortunato] (1984). 'Some of these works have fragmented structures and all contain intertextual links to other stories. The embedded stories in these texts are often not Australian in origin but have travelled to Australia from elsewhere, reflecting the migrational history that shapes one aspect of contemporary Australian identity.'
Blaber argues that 'in the shift from processes of state-nationalist identities to post-nationalist ones there emerges an opportunity for the re-figuration of a populist imaginary and an associated populist politics. By populist imaginary, I refer to a form of nostalgia, underwritten by processes of reminiscence and anecdote, which creates a sense of the past that imagines a social and political order that at once simplifies and "restores" a way of life based in community or collectivity in the face of the changing understanding of the relationship between the national and the global.'
Blaber concludes, 'the felt presence of the populist imaginary must be understood as indicative of a return to, and a new iteration of, a foundational moment, suggesting that the question of national or collective identity can never be totally settled, and that identity is always a pattern of recurrence.'
'In this paper, recent invasion novels by John Marsden provide a case study for examining the subtextual configurations of meaning that underlie the proposition of Asian threat and allow insight into the historical and cultural unconscious of an anxious settler nation.' (p.86)
Ross argues that 'the persistence of the Asian invasion narrative indicates white Australia's fears for security of tenure ... and demonstrates the underlying paranoia that a nation founded on invasion could possibly be lost by invasion.'
Sturm concludes his discussion on Chamier's novels by saying they are 'exemplary in that they illustrate the way settler society is founded on negation through Raleigh's reflexive "tarrying with the negative." I'd say that the only way to overcome this settler bind (that settlers seem to be fated to resettle) is to accept that we just have to live with it - it cannot be solved. It can't be cut like the Gordian knot; we - settlers and Maori, that is - are tied together.
Wevers proposes that 'there are complex unfoldings around indigeneity, globalisation and the postcolonial which might usefully be illuminated by a consideration of some texts from Australia, Aotearoa/New Zealand and the Pacific.'
Wevers investigation leads her to conclude that 'Indigeneity is always placed; its politics, worldview and social order are site- and culturespecific, but in the unfolding of many indigenous texts a new discourse is appearing, in which the nation state and its long binarising history of "natives" is only one part of the scene, and where "indigeneity" re-articulates and responds to globalised discourses, one of which is postcolonial politics.'
Buckridge writes, 'The life and work of Peter Austen, an Australian poet and participant in the First World War, exemplify the defamiliarising function of the single instance, and suggest the possibility of unfamiliar, even "strange" ways in which people could live out the conventional role of the "soldierpoet." This paper offers an account of his brief writing career from that perspective.'
Buckridge aims 'to consider Peter Austen's work historically, as the record of an encounter between a certain kind of literary sensibility and the experience of active service. I am interested, in other words, in the process by which he 'wrote his war", in the cultural capital and aesthetic assumptions he brought to the confrontation, and in how these may have enabled him to come to terms with it and survive it. I shall also touch, finally, on the question of how the prolonged assaults on his sensibility changed his personality and his life...'
Frugtneit asserts that 'the character of Teresa Hawkins [in For Love Alone] displays many of the physiological and psychological symptoms of anorexia. She starves herself in her quest for love, a form of self-abnegation by which she gradually denies sustenance to both her body and mind.'
Frugtneit concludes: 'In the autobiographical For Love Alone Teresa Hawkin's self-starvation in her quest for love reveals how food, desire and identity are inextricably linked ... Ultimately [Theresa] is empowered and she demonstrates her empowerment by reconciling the psychological conflicts that affected her physically through writing the self. Her debilitated body strengthens as she recognises the profound way in which she has achieved independence and sexual liberation. In For Love Alone Teresa's anorexia is a testament to the paradoxes and dilemmas that confront women and their quest for identity.'
In Lilian's Story, Lilian 'claims, "I have never cultivated the burden of memory." This essay extends Lilian's suggestion in order to problematise the "burden of translation" and its significance for recent ideas of history as performance, variously applied by writers from Greg Dening to Judith Butler.' (p.162) Further, 'this essay examines the translation from novel to film, and its significance to ideas of the "re-staging" of history through performance.' (p.164)
