'Christina Stead's relationship with the Communist Party is still the subject of considerable debate. According to her most authoritative biographer, Stead's creative passions were kindled by personalities, not politics, and she had no desire to join the party. Her 'commitment', Hazel Rowley asserts, 'was to her writing, not politics' (Rowley, 1993: 254), as if the two were distinct and separate spheres; and certainly there are lengthy complaints in Stead's letters about party-hacks and their blinkered actions.' (p 17)
This essay explores the literary tendency to: 're-write and re-read in fictional terms those artificial 'truths' of history - raised to the rank of the official veracity in the process of the political genesis of the nation -, a literary tendency which has dwelled, in the last twenty years, upon some crucial moments in Australian colonial history.' (p85)
This essay will explore, 'the most significant steps which have been most recently taken in Australia with the aim of fostering such a process; the analysis will be conducted through an overview of major institutional undertakings in that respect and through a consideration of the central role of narratives as powerful instruments of investigation endowed with the strength of imagining and shaping a different future.' (109)
'Never, as in the translation of Aboriginal myths, the problem of whether it is a case of translation or transformation appears more dramatic. The stories of Aboriginal myths have certainly suffered for various manipulations in the course of time, because they are older than most archaic western poems. Several of them were lost after the arrival of the white colonists. The surviving stories were collected in field studies and translated/transported into English and, usually, from English into other languages.' (p183)
'Bernard Hickey was a man of many loves. He loved the friends he made around the world. He loved Trinity College, Dublin, where he first studied abroad. He loved his ancestral source land of Ireland, and the many friends he made there. He loved his native Australia' and his adopted home in Italy. Through his career in Venice, and then in Lecce, he tirelessly promoted the study of Australian literature, not only in Italy, but throughout Europe. Yet he wa no uncritical patriot. As an outsider, he was an engaged observer of life and events in Ireland and Italy, but throughout his life he remained proud to be an Australian.' (p 195)
