Cirrus@Austlit

'In Australian fiction from the colonial period onward the transvestite is a recurrent figure in those rural and bush settings which function as metonyms of Australia, and onto which mythologies of distinctively Australian identities are so often invented. Transvestites continued their service of traversing rural Australia into the 1990s, mapping out spaces for identity formation in The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994), however this essay will focus on three narratives from the colonial period, to examine the deployment of transvestism in fiction written in the period leading up to Australian Federation in 1901. Such a focus is timely at the advent of the centenary of Federation in 2001 in its investigation of an enduring trope of white Australian identity and its relationship to the occupation and settlement of place. Examination of the operations of transvestic tropism identifies the literal fictionality of such claims by their situation in a highly conventional Romantic aesthetic and epistemology. The texts I will focus on are: Joseph Furphy's Such is Life, published in 1903 but written mostly in the 1890s, Tasma's "Monsieur Caloche" (1889), and Ernest Favenc's "The Parson's Blackboy" (1893)' (Lead paragraph).