Australian identity

In recent decades nationalism has sometimes been classed in the same category of immoral behaviours as racism and sexism. Reading from the historical and literary record, nationalism often appears to have been little other than racism and sexism. Race was…

Discusses the perception of a division in Australian society between those who followed the English model and pattern and those who adopted differing manners of indigenous white society. Suggests that Kingsley’s view of Australia in Geoffry Hamlyn is “a longing…

WALTER Murdoch, Professor of English at the University of Western Australia for thirty years and once Australia's best known essayist, has been typecast as a conservative and an imperialist. Nevertheless, his essay 'A Humble Protest' takes up and disputes the…

In an interview on Canadian Radio, Peter Carey talked about a church from his home town in Australia that he had wanted to save - an incident which became the inspiration for Oscar and Lucinda. Carey explained: “I lived…

In the conclusion to her germinal study of sex, race and nation in Australian women's writing, Along the Faultlines (1995), Susan Sheridan questions the prevalent orientations of Australian and literary cultural studies. In particular she draws attention to its 'fixed…

THERE are two parts to this title. That which comes after the colon is an obvious reference for an Australian collection such as this, both authors having gained a level of prominence that made them famous internationally. In the United…

Kiernan questions whether Such is Life reflects the “spirit of the nineties” and whether the ideas that Tom Collins expresses in his digressions are simply Joseph Furphy expressing ideas prevalent at the time. Kiernan concludes that Tom Collins’ digressions must…

In a 1996 interview Chris Wallace-Crabbe observed: 'There was a stage when those of us who wrote about the scorned suburbs were looked down on by scions of the squattocratic gentry, like Judith Wright and Geoff Dutton. Subconsciously, they treated…

The author’s account of Fly Away Peter is intended ‘to raise the question of the relation between Malouf’s closely intertwined narratives of the Great War and the formation of Australian identity and, on the other hand, Aboriginal narratives of dispossession…

There is something queer about quotation, and something creepy too. To quote is to deconstruct the alleged distinction between speech spoken by me ('my' speech) and speech spoken by someone else ('your' speech; or 'his', 'hers', 'theirs' or 'ours'). What…

The Conversations at Curlow Creek is David Malouf's eighth substantial work of fiction, and his most recent. Only two of these eight works, notably Harland's Half Acre (1984) and The Great World (1990), are much longer than two hundred pages…

Somewhere around 1915-18, Mary Gilmore worked on assembling a collection of poems translated from, or based on, Spanish originals. The Mitchell Library hold two typescript copies of a set of 27 poems, entitled FROM THE SPANISH; these correspond closely with…

Using a number of Australian periodicals as sources, the essay explores how the apparently conflicting notions of nationalism and internationalism, of mono-cultural self-searching and multicultural orientation shaped Australian literary debate in the 1880s.