Van Diemen's Land transportee John Leonard wrote an autobiographical account of his experiences in the penal colony between his arrival in Hobart Town in 1835 and his pardon in 1844. His manuscript came to the attention of the editor of short-lived Melbourne serial Australian Magazine, who published excerpts from Leonard's manuscript in the Reviews section of the November 1859 issue. The article 'The Life and Adventures of John Leonard, a Prisoner in V.D. Land' is the only surviving version of Leonard's testimony. The published article records how accounts by convict authors were rendered communicable, publishable and saleable in mid-nineteenth-century Australia.
The published excerpts of Leonard's manuscript are characteristic of prison narrative in the way the author constructs an autonomous and individualised subject-protagonist. The editor who prepared Leonard's manuscript for publication, however, constructs the protagonist as entirely passive and victimised in accordance with the magazine's stated objective to illustrate the failure of transportation as reformative and rehabilitative punishment. This paper argues that Leonard's carefully crafted autonomous autobiographical subject is confined and subjugated in publication and rendered a 'narrative captive,' incapable of autobiographical autonomy within the confines of the publication apparatus.
This narrative captivity is elucidated through a close reading of examples from the published text. Three particular conditions of confinement are identified and illustrated: extensive editorial interruption and manipulation of Leonard's manuscript; editorial adherence to received modes of writing about convictism in preparing the manuscript for publication; and the editor's misreading of Leonard's strategies to recover within autobiography the autonomy and individuality denied in the experience of Van Diemen's Land convictism. The paper concludes by situating Leonard's narrative captivity as illustrative of the machinations encoded in the publication of convict narratives, in which the convict author is only one contributor. (Author's abstract)
'Recent decades have seen the rise of a modern publishing phenomenon: mass public participation in the production and consumption of various forms of Life Writing.
Biography has been "democratised". The growth and diversity in the informal production of Biography underlines the confidence with which it is produced, effectually a statement that "my life is worth telling too." Similarly the commercially produced biographical product is subject to media and public scrutiny as never before, dissected for factuality and fairness.
There is an expectation that a subject, or a subject‟s friends, enemies, or relatives, have a right of reply to the printed word. The challenge to academics and biographers then, is to admit that the authorial voice is not tenured, and that a greater collaborative approach must be taken which shares power over the writing of a life.' (Author's abstract)
'This article examines the role of book publishing outside the cultural centres, where the lack of access to the gatekeepers of cultural production, such as literary agents, editors and publishers, has inhibited both the publishers' and region's reach into the public imagination.
It takes Western Australia as a case study, analysing the impact of geographical regionalism on the processes of book production and publication. Western Australia is infrequently represented in the cultura record, much less in those aspects of the cultural record that are transmitted overseas.
This imbalance in 'cultural currency' arises because regions are at least in part defined by their ability to participate in what Pierre Bourdieu has deemed the 'field of cultural production'. In the case of print culture, this field includes writers, literary agents, editors, publishers, government arts organisations, the media, schools, and book retailers, just to name a few.
This article pays particular attention to Western Australia's three major publishing houses (Fremantle Press, University of Western Australia Press, and the publisher of Indigenous literature, Magabala Books), as well as those Western Australian writers who have achieved the greatest international success, such as Tim Winton and Elizabeth Jolley. It demonstrates that the awareness of geographically and culturally diverse regions within the framework of the nation is derived from representations of these regions and their associated regional characteristics in the movies, television and books.' (Author's abstract)
'This paper considers the Australian preoccupation with the national image abroad. It has been argued that nations continually perform their identity for an international audience. By focusing on Australian responses to British reportage on Australia, it is possible to see how Australia's identity was created, debated and defended under the often critical gaze of the British press.
The way in which Australian governments chose to represent Australia in Great Britain was complicated by their frequent attempts to anticipate how the British saw Australia and Australians; as well as attempting to represent not only how Australians and expatriates saw Australia, but to accommodate how they wished Australia to be portrayed in London.' (Author's abstract)
'As a sample of the Australian female Gothic, critical discussion of Elizabeth Jolley's The Well (1986) has centrally focused on issues of gender, but not considered its racial inscription. This lack is especially relevant when criticism, despite praising the author's experimentation with narrative technique and genre, tends to voice dissatisfaction with the novel's conclusion in medias res, which never solves the tension between a presumed return to the patriarchal norm and the voicing of liberating alternatives.
After reviewing issues of genre, gender and class, this paper proposes a postcolonial perspective so as to come to terms with this dilemma, and argues that the text signals the impossibility of suppressing the Native from the contemporary Australian land and textscape, whose Gothic articulation in the uncanny shape of the male well-dweller haunts the novel's engagement with female empowerment. The female protagonist may only start overcoming a crippling gender discourse in the White postcolonial pastoralist setting by inscribing herself into 'Australianness'.
Reconciling her body with the land is significantly staged in terms of an Aboriginal cosmogony, as it is a 'walkabout' that allows Hester to start controlling her body and story. Thus, The Well may be understood to be inconclusive because it struggles to map gender across race at a time of Aboriginal-exclusive multiculturalism. Written in the mid 1980s, it announces a point of inflection in thinking about native-nonnative relationships which would soon lead to attempts at 'Reconciliation' by mainstream Australia.' (Author's abstract)
'This article compares two 'lost child' incidents from non-indigenous Australian fiction. One is from John Marsden's Tomorrow Series, the other from Mary Grant Bruce's Billabong Series. Both series feature as their central character a young girl with the surname Linton who proves herself brave, daring, and a good friend and citizen, particularly when rescuing children lost in the bush. When the two series' lost child incidents are compared, it becomes apparent that these outward resemblances are also mirrored by some deeper discursive parallels.
An analysis of the constructions of subjectivity and spatiality around the 'lost child' events reveals closely-matching discourses of mateship and settler belonging. The comparison also foregrounds the core ideologies of gender, class, nationalism and race that in turn underpin these discourses, showing how each of these texts remains inflected with textual strategies of othering and indigenisation that are fundamental to imperialism.' (Author's abstract)
