Cirrus@Austlit

'Since the nineteenth century, Australian art and writing has had a double vision of the country, as a sunny land of opportunity, and as a place of loneliness and loss. [...] Recent fiction by white writers has, like Lawson, shown an awareness of the strangeness of the land, but it locates this strangeness more directly in the brutality and defeats of settlement. The sufferings of both settlers and of those they violently displaced continue to haunt their successors' (139). The paper examines the nature of this haunting in recent novels by white Australian writers.