Australian literature and writers

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…

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…

‘This essay develops on the premise of imagining, which is the heart of story-making: imagine the physicality of story. Imagine the deployment strategies, the covert ‘translations’ of difference’ that facilitate the entry of the Other story through the gate.
And…

The main concerns of this essay are the nature and intensity of the literary experience in the setting of the increasingly popular literary festivals in Australia.

As a 'regional celebrity writer' of national and international acclaim, Australian writer Tim Winton contributes to the process of re- defining sustaining myths of identity and belonging in the white Australian imaginary (see Huggan 7). Emerging as a West Australian…

As the epigraph for True History ifthe Kelly Gang (2000), Peter Carey chooses these lines from William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun (1950): 'The past is not dead. It is not even past' (Carey, True 2). Contained in these words…

The scent of opium, the 'tears' of the poppy flower, the dried secretions of papaver somniferum, wafts throughout many histories of life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Besides its considerable impact on the trade between nations and…

‘Patrick White’s fiction has been ambivalently received. For all its celebration, dissenters continue to insist on a gap between its reputation and its actual achievements. In this essay, I want to take a step towards strengthening our assessment of it…

Sometime during the early 1920s, Lesbia Harford wrote The Invaluable Mystery, a novel which concerns Sally, an urban working-class woman, and her struggle to survive on her own when her German-born father, Mr Putman, and brother, Max, are interned…

Since the finding of the Australian High Court in what has come to be known as the Mabo decision of January 1992, the phrase Terra Australis which is much used by Herbert might be taken to represent a significantly altered…

‘Michel Foucault defined history as ‘the discourse of power’ (Society 68), arguing that the function of a ‘counter-history’ is ‘to show that laws deceive, that kings wear masks, that power creates illusions, and the historians tell lies’ (Bainbridge 58). Writing…

‘In 1934 Miles Franklin described Eleanor Dark’s second novel, Prelude to Christopher, as ‘a terribly beautiful piece of work’ (128). One of Dark’s earliest critics, Franklin attributed the book’s strength to the author’s deft handling of a tragic theme…

‘This essay attempts to outline the relationship between the ‘raw nerves’ that Denis Byrne describes in the epigraph above, and the cultivation of ‘indifference’ that Stanner identifies as being characteristic of ‘European life’ in Australia. Here I situate indifference as…