Issue Details: First known date: 2012... 2012 A Poetics of the Plough : Ned Kelly's the Jerilderie Letter
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'What we might call, after Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, the settlement "assemblage" of ploughing, requires a horse or bullock, a farmer, and a plough (and land): an assemblage that is undone by Ned Kelly and his gang. In the following article I read The Jerilderie Letter for the agricultural milieu that Kelly emerged from, a milieu that Kelly both mourned and rejected, or perhaps reinvented: his rejection expressed primarily by his misuse of the plough as armour and numerous metaphorical references in the text to anti-settlement style farming operations, including such extremes as manuring the land with those who helped the police.' (Source: Introduction)

Notes

  • Epigraph:
    And lo, the unploughed Future, boys! - Charles Harpur (14)

    The poet shall not spend his time in unneeded work. He shall know that the ground is already ploughed and manured . - Walt Whitman (6)

    Why haven't we our great fiction . . . of the hand that guided the plough? - Mary Gilmore (287)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

  • Appears in:
    y separately published work icon Southerly vol. 72 no. 2 2012 Z1930923 2012 periodical issue 2012 pg. 77-96.
Last amended 4 Apr 2013 14:22:36
77-96. A Poetics of the Plough : Ned Kelly's the Jerilderie Lettersmall AustLit logo Southerly
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