'Few episodes in postcolonial Australian history have shown so remarkable a capacity to generate ever-increasing cross-fertilisations between myth, history and memory than the narratives centred on Eliza Fraser. The archive of materials surrounding the shipwreck of this British woman and her brief sojourn among the indigenous people of the Badtjala community of Fraser Island in the nineteenth century continues to grow.
Kay Schaffer's impressive work overtook earlier studies of the phenomenon but concentrates mainly on the many European re-constructions of the episode .The fecundity of the materials is far from exhausted. This paper explores some of the Aboriginal reactions to the tale but its main focus is Patrick White's novel A Fringe of Leaves, which grew out of his own research and constructs a new myth with implications for the nation. It is a work with the potential for developing (in Jim Davidson's words) "a myth of reconciliation, and possibilities of growth." This paper shows White's melding of history, myth, memory and imagination in this novel is illustrative of the literary artist's contribution to "writing the nation." ' Source: Cynthia vanden Driesen.
'Critical discussion of Elizabeth Jolley's The Well (1986) has largely focused on issues of gender, but little has been said about the racial inscription of the novel. 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.
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 nativenonnative relationships which would soon lead to attempts at "Reconciliation" by mainstream Australia.' Source: Cornelis Martin Renes.
'This paper has developed out of a larger work in progress, which focuses on representations of Italy in contemporary Australian fiction and non-fiction prose. This larger project aims to add to an established body of work on travel writing by considering Australian texts that describe Australian travel in Italy, Italian people and Italian places.
In this paper, I will specifically focus on the representations of Italy in Robert Dessaix's novel Night Letters (1996). My paper will explore the relationship between the writer's actual journey in Italy and that of the creative work's main character. The novel offers the protagonist's account in the form of letters, which describe his travel from Switzerland across Northern Italy to Venice. I will begin by briefly outlining the Italian itinerary followed by Dessaix that would eventually inspire the novel. I will then explore the relationship between Dessaix's notebooks recording his two journeys in Italy and the literary accomplishment of Night Letters. My aim is to show ways in which an itinerary becomes a story, a complex narrative. Reference will be made to factual accounts and descriptions in the author's own diaries with an analysis of their generative role as key sources for the fictional work. This will be done through a close reading of particular passages, in the diaries and in the novel, concerning the same event.
A comparative analysis of the notebooks and Night Letters can show that Dessaix's diary entries relating to Italian places are woven into the fictional fabric of the 'night letters' according to a unifying principle.' Source: Roberta Trapè.
'From Exodus to the American Dream, from Terra Nullius to the Yellow Peril to multicultural harmony, migration has provided a rich source of myth throughout human history. It engenders dreams, fears and memories in both migrant and resident populations; giving rise to hope for a new start and a bright future, feelings of exile and alienation, nostalgia for lost homelands, dreams of belonging and entitlement, fears of invasion, dispossession and cultural extinction. It has inspired artists and writers from the time of the Ancient Testament to the contemporary age of globalisation and mass migration and it has exercised the minds of politicians from Greek and Roman times to our era of detention centres and temporary visas.
This reading of Asian-Australian picture books will focus on immigrants' perception of the "new worlds" of America and Australia. The Peasant Prince, a picture-book version of Li Cunxin's best-selling autobiography Mao's Last Dancer, sets up tensions between individual ambition and belonging, illustrated by contrasts between the Chinese story "The Frog in the Well" and the Western fairy-tale of Cinderella, to which Li Cunxin's own trajectory from poor peasant boy in a Chinese village to international ballet star is explicitly related. Shaun Tan's The Lost Thing and The Arrival trace the journey from alienation to belonging by means of fantasy worlds encompassing both utopic and dystopic visions. By way of a conclusion, the paper considers the nature of myth as evoked and dramatised in these texts, contrasting the idea of myth as eternal truth with Roland Barthes' insistence that myth is a mechanism which transforms history into nature.' Source: Wenche Ommundsen.
