Cirrus@Austlit

'From the earliest days of the British settlement of Australia, India and the crown colony of Ceylon were a familiar part of the colonists’ world. As Margaret Steven (1965:26) has noted ‘the first links made by the new colony were with India’. When supplies ran short, as they often did, ships from Calcutta brought grain, foodstuffs, spirits, clothing and live animals. India provided a lifeline for the new settlement. Many trading and shipping connections then developed, creating an increasing flow of administrators, merchants, army personnel, clergy and tourists between the Indian subcontinent and Australia. Australians constantly heard about the conditions of life in India, along with its scenic marvels, architecture, philosophies, mysteries and climate. Australia’s Indian connection was to remain strong for much of the 19th century.' (Introduction)

'From the earliest days of the British settlement of Australia, India and the crown colony of Ceylon were a familiar part of the colonists’ world. As Margaret Steven (1965:26) has noted ‘the first links made by the new colony were with India’. When supplies ran short, as they often did, ships from Calcutta brought grain, foodstuffs, spirits, clothing and live animals. India provided a lifeline for the new settlement. Many trading and shipping connections then developed, creating an increasing flow of administrators, merchants, army personnel, clergy and tourists between the Indian subcontinent and Australia. Australians constantly heard about the conditions of life in India, along with its scenic marvels, architecture, philosophies, mysteries and climate. Australia’s Indian connection was to remain strong for much of the 19th century.'  (Introduction)

'The study of national images and stereotypes has slipped from fashion in some quarters since the rise of postcolonial theory in the 1980s followed by globalisation studies in the 1990s. But as Wolfgang Zach ably reminds us, opposition to the study of national images was also opposed by universalist theorists in the 1950s and 60s led by Rene Wellek (Zack & Kosok 1987:ix–xii). Despite such opposition, then and since, national studies have continued in a variety of forms ranging from the impressionistic to the systematic. Stereotypes and autostereotypes, as well as more in-depth, qualitative analyses recur as writers from one nation attempt to describe or typify another. This essay attempts to explore some of the ways in which India and Indian people were presented in prose narratives by Australians between 1850 and 1950. The approach is eclectic, taking into account historical context, genre and the use of national image-making of selves and others during a century of changing ideas of the nation.' (Introduction)

'As Victor Crittenden’s painstaking research (Crittenden 2005) has established, the Australian-born writer John George Lang published, either in serial or book form, more than 20 novels, several volumes of short stories, four volumes of poetry and at least two plays. Lang also published Wanderings in India (1859), sometimes called ‘a travel book’, and, according to Rolf Boldrewood (Thomas Alexander Browne), one of the best of the lighter descriptions of Indian life ever published. Most of the chapters in Wanderings in India first appeared in Lang’s English-language newspaper Mofussilite in the mid- to late-1840s in India; when they were republished between November 1857 to February 1859 in Charles Dickens’ Household Words, the travel sketches were offered in eleven parts, with the running title ‘Wanderings in India’. In 1857 Lang was living in London and, with the Indian Mutiny very much in the news, Dickens was eager to publish as much background material as he could find about India While a number of Lang’s pieces had appeared in Household Words as early as 1853, the majority were published just after the Sepoy Rebellion, allowing readers to set his sketches and stories against the evolving narrative of India’s first war of independence.In the complete collection that appeared in the 1859 Routledge edition, Lang used many of his Household Words pieces and added two new sketches written specifically for the volume, both of which say something about the Sepoy Rebellion and its aftermath.'  (Introduction)

'James Hingston (1830–1902) was born in London and arrived in Victoria in 1852, where he practised as a notary public, an agent authorised to draw up legal documents (Walker 2005:179–180). He built up considerable personal wealth from investing wisely in commercial opportunities following the goldrush era in Melbourne. Hingston never married and lived for over 30 years in his bedroom at the George Hotel, St Kilda, amid large piles of books and papers and a growing reputation for eccentricity. An indefatigable reader, he knew Shakespeare’s plays almost by heart and was considered one of Melbourne’s great raconteurs. He died at Exmouth, in England, in 1902.'  (Introduction)

'When Inez Baranay’s seventh book, Neem Dreams, was released in September 2003, it met with wide critical acclaim in India, yet was barely noticed in Australia. Baranay had been publishing in Australia for almost 20 years, but this novel was published in India, indicating a shift in her publishing career. While Neem Dreams continues Baranay’s interest in issues of Third-World development and with Western tourism, travel and trade, I propose in this chapter that it also engages with Australian literary criticism, especially in postcolonial debates. Neem Dreams was released almost a decade after Baranay’s nonfiction text, Rascal Rain (1994), which met with fierce criticism. That decade was one in which Baranay addressed that criticism, contemporary theory and the academy. I argue, therefore, that Neem Dreams signals Baranay’s uneasy relationship with Australian writing, publishing and identity, as well as her changed attitude to the academy and contemporary theory. While the back cover blurb of Neem Dreams alerts us to the neem tree ‘acting as a kind of crucible for India’, I want to argue that, in many ways, postcolonial theory is the crucible for this book. In this chapter then, I offer a reading of Baranay’s literary career from 1994 to 2004 through its encounters with the academy, with Rascal Rain and Neem Dreams operating as bookends. Her substantial and productive career means that shifts in institutional and political discourses become evident in tracing the ways in which Baranay’s texts and career are read (and written). I am interested in the kinds of questions a career such as hers raises about the imbrication of theory and fiction and the circulation of authority among writers, critics and the academy.' (Introduction)

'Geographical isolation and innate curiosity have long motivated Australians to leave their shores and travel far and wide to broaden their horizons and experience cultural and social differences with countries established long before explorers began to map Australia. As well as responding to the touristic impulse, there is also the patriotic one of planting Australia’s name abroad, particularly in times of war. This essay looks at the writings of some of the travellers who converged on India, long before the hippy trail of the 1970s, through a historical lens, and compares these writings with a sample of those written later in the 20th century and the shifts in their perceptions and social and cultural awareness which evolved in modern times. India, which had long been purely a brief stopover on the P&O route for Australians, became a desirable place in its own right in the late 20th century, a mysterious subcontinent that signified high adventure and the exoticism of the other.' (Introduction)

'In the half-light, a black man’s hand strokes Ruth’s neck. She flicks him away like an insect, oblivious to the sensual energy she radiates. This is how filmmaker Jane Campion introduces Ruth (Kate Winslet), the central character of her 1999 film, Holy Smoke! This opening scene, of Ruth on a bus amidst the colour and vigour of a busy Indian city can be read not only as representing an experience common to Western women abroad in Southeast Asia but also as emphasising that Ruth is a luminous and irresistible beauty. This chapter begins by outlining the role India plays in Holy Smoke! (the film and the novel), then gives an overview of what makes this an Australian film (despite being made with international stars and money), followed by a discussion of how Campion uses the luminousness of her film’s central character to explore Western female experience,and finally, examines how the film explores ideas of how men and women might exist together in the world—or, what it is to be human.' (Introduction)

'It was late afternoon on a Wednesday in November 1987. I had spent the day strolling the narrow roads of Keoladeo National Park near Bharatpur in eastern Rajasthan. The park was a tapestry of life. There were cormorants, kingfishers and flamingos, chital, nilgai and sambar. I had even met an impressively big lizard, at least half as long as me. And there had been a large black and white crane not so much eating a fish as playing with it. First he would dart his beak into the pond, snatch the fish and give it three or four hearty shakes. Then he would fling it down into the water and grab it and start the game all over again. Proverbial behaviour for a cat, but a bit unsettling in a bird. The one animal in short supply in the park that day was people. Aside from a scattering of tourists, a ranger or two and a cluster of children on their way home from school, I had met no-one all day.' (Introduction)

'Like her travel agent in New Delhi, she had expected The Bird Lover’s Inn in Bharatpur to be no more than a one-star hotel: a sparse room with a dusty fan, a tap with a bucket in the bathroom, a bed with a thin foam mattress, and perfunctory accessories. But this time the brochure had not lied when it had offered her a ‘newly appointed room, off the well-beaten road close to the bird lover’s paradise’—well, as far as she knew anyway. It was dark when she arrived from Agra, so she did not know if the road was well-beaten or close to any kind of paradise. But she is both charmed and relieved by the attractive freshness of the new rooms at The Bird Lover’s Inn, the marble floors, the blue linen curtains and matching bed covers, especially the size of the bathroom. Her eyes water when she sees the deep bathtub, the shiny new faucets, the stand-up shower. After two months in India she is beginning to be able to smell her own hair, the dust and grime that have settled in its thickness, the premature greyness endowed upon her by the layers of mist and smog through which she has walked every day. The usual handheld showers never offered enough pressure to properly penetrate her thicket of amber curls; for a month now she has relied on surface moisture, perfunctory cleansing and leave-in conditioner. Her hair has developed textures that have nothing to do with hair: inorganic, hybrid, with smells and consistencies that have changed its colour more uniformly than any dye she might have used.'  (Introduction)

'I was having a coffee with Josh in Darlinghurst Road after we’d been to a movie about Andy Warhol at the Chauvel. Josh suddenly went ‘oh my god!’, interrupting his own monologue on mechanical reproduction and the uncredited work of assistants in the world of art, and called out ‘Larry!’, and, lo and behold, that’s who it was coming in to the café, Larry. This was not long after the astonishing night when freaky bearded Larry turned up on the street, and just after he had turned up at Isabel’s in his new clothes, which he was wearing now.'  (Introduction)

'I’m still trying to process my Indian experience and my surprise at discovering that there was another place in the world where I belonged, that felt like home. It was a strange experience, as residencies are, because on the one hand I was a tourist in the brash, exaggerated landscape of what Mark Twain called the ‘most extraordinary country that the sun visits on his rounds’ (Paine 1912:1013), and on the other I was isolated from the glare of that sun by my containment within the residency.' (Introduction) 

'‘Why don’t you go?’ my wife said.

'It was mid-August 2004 and my friend Neville Turner was going to India for the Tests in October. So was Rob Bartlett (a former Adelaide friend, now Melburnian) and his wife Kirsten on a delayed honeymoon. I told Rob that they should catch up with Neville who’d done half a dozen Test series on the subcontinent and knew the ropes.

'Hey! Why not?

'I’d been to India three times. Never for cricket.' (Introduction)