Australian Literature

Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005) enacts a narrative return to the violent trauma of Aboriginal dispossession and destruction upon which Australia is founded, situating its reader complexly, as both witness to and complicit in the events it retells. Her use of fiction to represent this trauma made Grenville the focus of heated public debate about the role of fiction in representing the past, a debate that repeatedly cast her project as historically dubious. However, rather than approaching the novel as a corrupted form of history’s reconstruction of past events, it seems more useful to situate this text as an act of memory in the present, which shapes both past and future. Even as it represents the past, Grenville’s novel addresses a present both deeply divided and in danger of forgetting its history. It uses the affective power of fiction to reinscribe and reactivate Aboriginal Australian history in the contemporary historical imaginary.

"When Ezra Pound quipped in a letter to R.P. Blackmur in 1924 that ‘one can no longer put Mt Purgatory forty miles high in the midst of Australian sheep land’, he was of course mocking the medieval cosmography of Dante’s La Divina Commedia, which locates Mount Purgatory in the Antipodes..."

This paper compares Vance Palmer’s classic novel, The Passage (1930) set in Caloundra, with Susan Johnson’s The Landing (2015), a comic novel of manners set a further north on the contemporary Sunshine Coast.  It considers the novels’ different perspectives on Australian society and changing values, including attitudes to nature, arguing that Palmer’s novel now seems more mythic than realist while Johnson presents a more cynical view of Australian life. It was delivered at the ASALvets conference in Caloundra on 18th April, 2016

On 21st June 2007, Alexis Wright won Australia’s most prestigious literary
award, the Miles Franklin Prize, for Carpentaria (2006) and received broad national
attention as the first Indigenous Australian to be its sole recipient. This recognition of
Indigenous cultural output coincided with the Federal decision to intervene the highlytroubled,
dysfunctional Aboriginal population in remote communities of the Northern
Territory with a military and police task force. This paradox of recognition-repression
highlights the tense edges of the Indigenous/non-Indigenous interface in contemporary
Australia and reveals the continuing gap between Indigenous fact and fiction, reality
and hope for a better future. As a textual locus of Indigenous cultural regeneration,
Carpentaria questions the invasive nature of the Federal intervention in several ways.
Not only does the novel stand out for bending Western literary genres into an
Indigenous story-telling mode, but also for having “Dreamtime Narrative” critically
engage with the neo-colonial management of Australian resources and human relations.
Mainstream readers are exposed to the “strange cultural survival” (Bhabha 1990: 320)
of the Indigenous diaspora that proposes drastic solutions for the devastation wreaked
upon the Australian land through capitalism and its cultural corollaries. This article
contextualises Wright’s fiction within wider developments in recent Indigenous
literature and history, and traces how her awarded novel Carpentaria activates an
Aboriginal epistemology of understanding human and country which defies mainstream
politics of I/intervention and beckons towards a fresh beginning for Australia through a
profound change of paradigm.
Key words: Alexis Wright; Indigenous Australian literature; Northern Territory
Intervention

Andrew Leigh is an economist turned lawyer and, incidentally, a federal politician. Just About Everything looks at the way that the gathering of data and the application of concepts borrowed from traditional economics can provide insights into most aspects of our world.
Inter alia, Leigh explains why conditions were better for the convicts transported to Australia at certain times as opposed to others; how much time and effort we should put into finding the perfect life partner; and whether there is any point in finishing books we do not enjoy.
Just About Everything is particularly useful in understanding why evidence based policy making may actually assist our leaders to make our society better.

‘All Australian children deserve to know the country that they share through the stories that Aboriginal people can tell them,’ write Gladys Idjirrimoonra Milroy and Jill Milroy (2008: 42). If country and story, place and voice are intertwined, it is vital that we make space in Australian creative writing classrooms for the reading and writing of Australian Indigenous story. What principles and questions can allow us to begin? We propose six groundings for this work:

Indigenous story is literary history, literary history is creative power.
We do culture together: culture becomes in collaboration, conscious or unconscious.
There is no such thing as Indigenous story, and yet it can be performed and known.
Country speaks, to our conceptions of voice and point of view.
History and memory are written in the land and on the body in bodies of practice.
Story transmits narrative responsibility.  Narrative responsibility requires fierce listening.
This two-part paper will discuss each of these groundings as orienting and motivating principles for work we do as teachers of introductory creative writing units at the University of Canberra.

Abstract: The article examines diasporic dilemma in the poetry of Fleur Adcock, an internationally acclaimed poet of New Zealand origin. Based on representative texts from her Poems 1960–2000 (2000), the article examines the postcolonial fear of losing one’s original culture and the process of coming to terms with the isolation that Adcock’s relocation to Britain caused. The theme of diaspora in Adcock’s work is discussed in the context of the poet’s exclusion from both New Zealand
and British culture. She describes the panic of not belonging to one’s native community and the ambivalent reception in the adopted country. Adcock’s poetry provides images of displacement – both mental and geographical – resulting in a quest for identity that may not easily be completed. The article analyzes Adcock’s Europeanized view of her native New Zealand as Adcock’s poetry is the artistic result of two-way cultural traffic between New Zealand and Britain.
Keywords: Fleur Adcock; New Zealand; United Kingdom; Britain, poetry; diaspora; postcolonial
literature; feminism; colonization in reverse

'Country Manifest' is the unpublished dissertation from my PhD in creative writing, 'Nature in the Twenty-First Century', completed at the University of New South Wales in 2016. The creative work, 'Six Capitals', was published in 2014 and 2020. This following is the abstract from the completed PhD.

This thesis is comprised of two parts—a work of nonfiction, Six Capitals, and a scholarly dissertation, Country Manifest—which investigate the vital contemporary relationship between western economics and the natural world. Six Capitals charts the breakdown of economic measures of wealth and conceptions of nature in the face of ecological crises and the advent of the networked computer. It argues that the measures that underpin industrial capitalism and today govern the global economy are inadequate for an age of climate change. This has brought attempts to measure previously unmeasured realms of wealth, figured as ‘capital’, such as ‘natural capital’ and ‘social capital’. Six Capitals argues that this proposed new system of measurement is not enough to address the contemporary crises in nature. Instead, a new corporation and a new conception of nature in western law are required.

Country Manifest examines five novels by Alexis Wright and Kim Scott published after the 1992 Mabo Decision which overturned the legal concept of terra nullius in Australia. The novels are Wright’s Plains of Promise (1997), Carpentaria (2006) and The Swan Book (2013); and Scott’s Benang: From the heart (1999) and That Deadman Dance (2010). Drawing on ecocriticism, it examines their portrayal of two conflicting conceptions of land: Aboriginal conceptions of land as ‘Country’, a vibrant ecological system with agency to which humans belong; and western constructions of land as inert property owned by humans to be developed for profit. It argues that the novels privilege the former over the latter understanding of land and in so doing rewrite the continent as ‘black land’. Through its focus on ‘black land’ this thesis reintroduces ‘landscape’ to Australian literary criticism and shows it to be of new significance in the twenty-first century, and argues this has implications for a planet faced with climate change and other ecological crises.

Six Capitals and Country Manifest are related by their mutual engagement with questions about the value of the natural world and human conceptions of it. In both economic constructions of nature are shown to be damaging to the natural world and complicit in contemporary ecological crises.

While this landmark anthology refuses the "voyeuristic obsession with tragedy and trauma as the ultimate and only contribution of Aboriginal writing to Australian literary studies" (xix), at their most angered, the poems in Guwayu "sing for the massacres that litter our lands" (Ali Cobby Eckermann, page 39), and recall "Connected sites of significance [that] have disappeared" (Lorna Munro, page 6).

This paper reports findings from a study investigating trends in character, historical setting, authorship and themes across Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) text selection lists between 2010 and 2019. We address the fictionalisation and imagining of Australian history through narratives about Indigeneity and settler-colonisation. While we will describe positive trends that have emerged over time, by and large this study agrees with Leane's (2016) and Langton's (1993) assertions regarding the transmission of knowledge and representation of Indigeneity and Australian history in the classroom; namely, there is an under-representation of Indigenous authors, poets, playwrights, film directors, and complex, non-stereotypical charactertypes and an over-representation of non-Indigenous authors representing themes and stories of Indigeneity, reconciliation and colonisation.

Literary biographers often interpret their subjects’ fiction autobiographically, an approach which has been condemned by some critics. As a biographer of the Australian novelist Katharine Susannah Prichard (1883-1969), I have found different relationships between her fiction and her life. Notably, Prichard invited an autobiographical interpretation of her children’s novel, The Wild Oats of Han (1928), while discouraging it for her novel Intimate Strangers (1937). The focus of this paper is an earlier, obscure serial, “A City Girl in Central Australia” (1906), which is not simply a work of fiction which can be read autobiographically, but rather a work playfully positioned on the boundary of fiction and autobiography. One of the few works by Prichard written in the first person, it is presented as a series of letters from “Kit” (one of Prichard’s nicknames) to her mother. Introducing the serial, the magazine stated that it was based on her experiences as a governess on an outback sheep station, a position she’d held the previous year at Tarella Station in New South Wales. The tension between its fictional and autobiographical elements can be seen in an angry letter in a local newspaper rebuking the first episode for its exaggerations and untruths. As fiction, the mix of realism and romance in “City Girl” anticipate Prichard’s later novels. As autobiography read alongside archival sources, “City Girl” yields some valuable insights into Prichard’s life.

In children’s and young adult literatures, the way that literature provides readers with diverse ways of seeing the world, is particularly relevant as those texts can be considered to function as agents of socialization that promote the norms of behaviour of a nation, as well as its cultural images and narratives (Pearce 2003, 238). Young people literature rewrites “social and cultural history for the purpose of shaping the present” (Stephens 1996, 181) and can thus mediate the transformation of attitudes and values, or confirm existing ones (Macintyre 2011, 352) such as the evolution of multiculturalism. Indeed, Pearce (2003) has argued that multicultural representation is at a third stage in which “ethnicity is not a marker of cultural difference but an accepted part of Australian life” (246), having gone beyond two previous stages that had “superficial or cosmetic” (Fish 1997, 378) depictions of multiculturalism such as stories centred on Anglo-Celtic protagonists benefiting from an exotic ethnic other, or told from the point of view of an “ethnic” insider by Anglo-Celtic writers (Stephens 1996).
However, I will argue that multiculturalism and its representations have not reached such a stage. Alice Pung’s young adult fictional novel Laurinda (2014) showcases the covert racism that Australia’s politics of multiculturalism still conceal under its well-intentioned but superficial acceptation of ethnic minorities “by virtue of Othering” (Ang 2001: 139) into its Anglo-Celtic structure. While set in the 90s, the protagonist Lucy Lam, a second-generation Chinese-Vietnamese teenager, is subjected to many instances of covert racism (Dunn et al. 2004) that still occur nowadays. Those instances will be analysed in key extracts that feature food due to its historical use in the articulation of attitudes throughout Australia’s changing relationship with immigration and its Asian neighbours.

Copyright©2018 Nicholas Manganas. This text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our Creative Commons Licence. Abstract: This article takes an autobiographical approach to explore the changes that have occurred in Australian suburbia over the past twenty years. It considers two key queer texts—Christos Tsiolkas's Loaded (1995) and Peter Polites's Down the Hume (2017)—and the manner in which the protagonists of these novels express their class and sexuality in their respective suburbanscapes. Published more than twenty years apart, I argue that the process of queering Australian suburbia that can be read in both novels opens up a space to reimagine how class, ethnic and sexual mobility is negotiated in contemporary Australia.

In Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), Christina Stead evokes the city’s history in her naming of the Tank Stream Press, the novel’s central location. The fresh water Tank Stream assured the colony’s survival in its fledgling years; however, it soon became an open sewer and was buried as a stormwater drain in order to maintain public health. This essay argues that Stead uses the Tank Stream’s watery history to shape a narrative about cultural life and urban modernity in early twentieth-century Sydney. The functioning of the business is informed by the stream’s various identities of essential water supply, sewer and drain: at times, it seems as if culture and learning may usher in an intellectual and internationalist utopia in the city, liberating the minds and bodies of those who inhabit it; at others, all such hope is lost. The narrative Stead develops around the printery and its employees brings local place into contact with transnational socialist and other intellectual discourses, and links both to culture as a material, interactive force within the urban milieu. Through a close reading of the Tank Stream Press, this essay explores the novel’s conflicted vision of culture, politics and urbanity in modern Sydney.

Elizabeth Harrower’s Down in the City (1957) provides a complex vision of Sydney equal to those of Patrick White or Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney.  The novel centres on a Kings Cross apartment block, and offers a still-relevant representation of Sydney’s burgeoning urbanism in its deft portrait of the building and its damaged and damaging inhabitants. Harrower’s work often features females subjugated by vampiric men who limit or deny their bodily engagement with the spaces they inhabit; in Down in the City this relationship is both aided and abetted by a city that seems in turns complicit in the abuse and an only escape from it. As such, the novel has much to say about identity in modern urban environments. This paper draws on critical geography to explore the novel’s response to contemporary questions of domestic urbanism, gendered spatial relations and the dialectics of public and private space.

In 2010, The Small Press Network (SPN), Australia’s advocacy group for independent publishers, embarked on a project to facilitate digital distribution for Australian small publishers. This article documents and analyses the difficulties that SPN navigated in the course of establishing this service. This case study illuminates the complexity of developing networks of cultural production in an Australian industry that has quickly become globalized and convergent. It also speaks to some of the inherent contradictions of convergence on a more abstract level: while SPN’s experience does reflect the commonly held belief that new modes of digital distribution can present a variety of opportunities for smaller players in the market as traditional supply chains are disaggregated, it has also revealed that accessing these opportunities often requires assuming a level of organizational complexity that lies beyond the capacity of many (if not most) smaller businesses. While this article mostly takes the form of a case study, it is enriched with quantitative data from SPN member-surveys, essential contextual information about the Australian publishing industry, and reflections on the contradictions inherent to convergent publishing. It contributes to the field by offering unique reflections on Australian independent publishers’ experience of digital convergence.

This research aims to elaborate the journey of Australian Indigenous in Tara June Winch's novel entitled Swallow the Air. This novel is about journey of half-Aboriginal girl through Australia in search of self-realisation and sense of belonging. She encounters the condition of modern Australia which is different from her expectation about traditional land. The encounters result negotiations between herself and Other. Using Carl Thompson's concept of travel writing, this research analyze the pattern of reportation of the world, revelation of self, and represetation of other, also elaborate agenda of Swallow the Air as a travelogue. The analysis uses are close reading and comparative as a research method. This research shows that modern Indigenous' identity and cultural crisis affected the pattern of travelogue. The pattern of reportation of the world and representation of other indicate subject position, between Europe and Aborigin. She portrays both sides as other, also deliver her comment on each group. As a postcolonial travel writing, this novel depicts power relation in contemporary Australia, to deliver ethical challenge to the government about Indigenous reconciliation. Carrying the spirit of cosmopolitan vision, this novel offers negotiation between traditional and modern values. It also conveys the strategy of liberation by directing toward wider identity, national or even global identity. As Indigenous travel writing, mobility in this novel accommodates the creation of wider and further attempt of resistence, by using network among communities or 'homes' as inter-sites of resistance placed under the umbrella of Australian nation. Nevertheless, that resistance attempt is nof fully flawless since it also contains risk of falling to the force of globalisation.

Popular media forms, from Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s poetry to the dystopian sci-fi television series Cleverman, have often been used by Aboriginal Australians to inform and entertain. The latest example of this type of political and artistic endeavour is Wiradjuri author Anita Heiss' new work Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms.

In our times, David Malouf in particular has transformed Brisbane into a city of the imagination as well as of bricks and mortar, or tongue and groove. This paper presents some earlier – and largely forgotten – evocations of Brisbane, beginning with Ludwig Leichhardt in 1844.

Christobel Mattingley is one of the great Australian children’s authors in the last decades of the Twentieth century, and beyond, with her first book, The Picnic Dog, published in 1970. But she is not as widely known, or celebrated as she deserves. Perhaps this is because, across the years, she has represented herself without relying on a dedicated literary agent. Perhaps it is because she has been published by many different publishing companies, without the persistent publicity and support that some authors receive from their one main publisher. Perhaps it is because she has published many kinds of books, such as picture-story books, chapter-books with illustrations, full-length Young Adult novels (before “Young Adult” was a publishing category), fantasy novels, and true-life stories, and critics and readers are confused by the variety. Perhaps it is because some of her finest books have a non-Australian setting, and Australian critics and readers are less interested in these. Perhaps it is because some of her books are for beginning readers, and the stories are considered “educational” rather than “literature”. Whatever the reason, in fact all that is necessary to begin to recognise Mattingley’s achievements is to read some of her books.
Who is Christobel Mattingley? And what has she written? And why should we pay attention to her books? I hope I can answer these questions and convince you that Mattingley deserves our attention.
This discussion is an introductory compilation (with some simple repetition and overlap) of my several published articles, reviews, analyses, and other attempts to promote awareness and appreciation of Christobel Mattingley’s large, and deeply satisfying body of work.

This chapter examines the international market for crime fiction within the context of the larger international book trade. It briefly surveys the success of crime fiction in the largest national markets and considers key drivers of crime fiction sales over the last decade. It then examines the way that texts move within and across national markets through a case study of Jane Harper's The Dry (2016)-a work that rose to prominence by winning an award for an unpublished manuscript in a secondary English-language market (Australia) and subsequently became an international bestselling work that is being adapted into a major motion picture.

Alfred Leslie Guppy was an extraordinary Australian. He was brave and loyal, honest and dutiful. In truth, there isn’t much extraordinary about that for an Australian of the time, but he was extraordinary nonetheless. He is a confirmed member of the Australian Great War Poetry canon, and he was the only known poet-prisoner in the canon. His bravery and service are well documented, and his post-war service should never be forgotten and well. Interestingly, he was also the first cousin of distinguished Australian World War Two Surgeon and POW survivor, Sir Edward “Weary” Dunlop.

Nineteenth-century girlhood was imagined as a decisive period of liminality: distinct from both childhood and adulthood, it shaped the womanhood that followed it. Shipboard diaries written by emigrants engage with a similar period of transformation. Discussing three diaries written by girls en route from Scotland and Ireland to New Zealand, this essay explores how the liminality of girlhood and the liminality of the emigrant voyage are intertwined. While narrating a spatial and temporal transition, the three texts also negotiate a transformation in the concept of girlhood: the notion of the ideal colonial girl as brave, resourceful and hardworking developed traditional British expectations of women as responsible for the domestic sphere and as upholders of morals. Whereas two of the diarists stress qualities such as bravery, a sense of adventure, and good health, the third diarists focuses on a more traditional concept of girls as pure and virtuous. The texts’ adherence to and departures from the genre conventions of shipboard diaries emphasise the liminality of the journey, mirroring the transformative potential of new notions of girlhood.

This article compares responses to travel writing and imaginative fiction about the settler colonies, in particular Australia and New Zealand, between 1870 and 1945—a time when distinctions between travel, mobility, and emigration were hard to pin down. Very little scholarship has shown an interest in what the subject society’s inhabitants thought of its portrayal, and what this can tell us about colonial and national identities. Australasian responses to works about Australasia, in the form of published reviews, were influenced by the knowledge and particular concerns of the reviewer and their own negotiations with identity. What mattered to readers and critics was the authenticity of the portrayal of the place, but this was not only related to whether the work claimed to be fiction or non-fiction. The perceived level of familiarity that the writer had with the area was the most important factor in determining whether the reception of a work was positive or negative.

Set in the year 2380, Amie Kaufman and Jay Kristoff’s young adult science fiction novel Aurora Rising tells the story of six recent teenage graduates of a military academy carrying out their first own mission. After a conventional start, the novel takes a turn for the weird when the protagonists discover a stowaway on their spaceship. Together with the mysterious girl, they
get caught up in an interplanetary conspiracy related to the assimilation plot of an alien collective consciousness called Ra’haam that uses human bodies as hosts. The climax of the story takes place on an abandoned planet teeming with uncanny flora and fauna that are employed by the incorporeal Ra’haam to fight and gain control over the human protagonists.
Using spores to infect human and non-human animals alike, the Ra’haam turn the bodies of their hosts into plant-animal hybrids. In my chapter, I will show how the novel employs uncanny representations of plants not just to create suspense, but also to address questions concerning the relationship between humanity and nature. While at first it appears as if nature acts as an anti-colonial agent, the novel ends up not critiquing exploitative (neo-) colonial-expansionist ways of thinking, but instead perpetuating them by pitting two imperial powers (humans vs. Ra’haam) against each other with other living beings caught in the crossfire.

Mateship is an important element of the so-called
“Australian Tradition” in literature. It consists of
a particular bond between men who travel the rural
areas known as “the bush” or “the outback”. This
article examines some of Henry Lawson’s mateship
stories, with a focus on the different connotations
that the term can assume for the author, especially
regarding the theme of egalitarianism. It considers
how the Bulletin Magazine, which “discovered”
Lawson and published many of his stories, had a role
in fostering a special model of Australian democracy
and a peculiar style for Australian literature. It
also reflects on how the dissemination of Lawson’s
stories through periodicals in the last decades of the
19th century helped create a feeling of what Benedict
Anderson calls “nation-ness”.

Brisbane Writers' Festival 2004 World War I represents something of a watershed in the participation of Brisbane women in literary life. There was a rapid increase in literary publications by women during and immediately after the war, and this was accompanied by an expansion of the range of subject matter tackled by women, and a diversification of genres. Perhaps the most striking phenomenon of the inter-war period is that the more professional of Brisbane's women writers shifted their output from poetry and short stories to novels. A case in point is Mabel Forrest, a well-known prewar poet, who wrote several highly successful novels during the inter-war period, including The Wild Moth (1924) which was made into the film The Moth of Moonbi by Charles Chauvel in 1926. Another example is Zora Cross, a successful local poet who moved to Sydney in the latter part of World War I, and began to publish novels such as Sisters of the Seven Mile [1924] and The Lute Girl of Rainyvale [1925]. Brisbane's teenage poet, Ernestine Hemmings, also moved to Sydney after the war and became the journalist and non-fiction author Ernestine Hill. 1 These two kinds of shifts – from poetry to prose and from Brisbane to Sydney – which were made by women who made a living from writing meant that Brisbane's inter-war women poets tended to be amateur or semi-professional, deriving the bulk of their income from sources other than publications. While this tendency produced a rather genteel and conservative milieu, without much of an experimental edge, we shouldn't underestimate the contribution of these women. If there is one element that characterises the poetry of Brisbane women during and immediately after World War I, it is a retreat from the 'bush poetry' of the earlier period, and the emergence of a more cosmopolitan aesthetic encompassing a broader range of themes: war and empire, motherhood and womanliness, religion and morality, the sex question and race. Women poets of this period seem to have consciously taken on the role of public poets, helping to negotiate Brisbane's transition from a frontier town to a modern, cosmopolitan city in which women had a voice. The prolific and popular Emily Coungeau perhaps best exemplifies the new, self-consciously 'cosmopolitan' type of woman writer who came to prominence in Brisbane during World War I. Coungeau was born in Essex in about 1860. As a teenager, she became a ladies' companion, travelling extensively in the Mediterranean and becoming fluent in five languages. She migrated to Australia in 1887 at the age of 17, and in 1889 married Naoum Coungeau, an Albanian restaurant keeper whom she had met on the island of Lesbos. 2 The couple moved to Brisbane, and from 1889 until 1919 they operated a wine saloon in Petrie Bight, almost opposite the Customs House. Here the Coungeaus served light wines, a continental style luncheon with fruit and confectionery, and a renowned café au lait made to Emily's special recipe. 3 The journalist Bernice May later recalled the saloon in 1916 as 'a picturesque place which was crowded with soldiers,

In 1932, the respected anthropologist Raymond Firth wrote that the Aboriginal Australian manifested a strange trait, one unlike their indigenous counterparts elsewhere in the colonised Pacific. The Indigenous person, Firth said, ‘mutely dies.’ It would take just two hundred years of settler-Indigenous contact—and, within that span, a few intense decades of frontier activity—to decimate the Indigenous people who had been in Australia for forty thousand years. If this population died at all ‘mutely’, then it may well have been in shock and trauma. Silence, after all, is a common response to extreme suffering. To invoke Cathy Caruth, this implores us to engage in ‘a new mode of reading and listening [or viewing] that both the language of trauma, and the silence of its mute repetition of suffering, profoundly and imperatively demands’. These relations between contemporary and historical silence—as well as suffering and violence—powerfully arise in Australian director Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah (2009), the focus of this chapter. Forgetting or denying Australia’s foundational structure of colonisation generates silence around what happened in the nation’s past. Samson and Delilah thus depicts trauma as a crisis of speech, a trope we can read as a reflection on representing Indigenous suffering in contemporary Australia. In analysing how the film depicts trauma in form and content, the chapter discusses silence, historical inheritances and belonging as central concerns of the film. These concerns draw all Australian subjects into positions of implication, although with incommensurate, unevenly distributed suffering between Indigenous and settler groups. Samson and Delilah is unflinching in its criticism of all implicated parties—the web of social, cultural and political forces acting on the couple at its centre. This adds up to an uncommonly holistic appraisal of the trails of trauma in a setting where colonisation is entrenched and continuing.

While the stereotype of Australian culture is one of relentless secularism, this essay examines the persistence of visions of the sacred in literary writing.
From Makarand Paranjape ed. Sacred Australia Melbourne: Clouds of Magellan, 2009: 21-43.

This paper examines the ways in which short stories have interacted with different national contexts throughout the history of modern Australia, endorsing and resisting what Fredric Jameson calls the symbolic resolution of narrative, and subsequently considers the processes by which certain critical trends and interpretive emphases can illuminate or obscure that interaction through comparative readings of texts by Henry Lawson and John Kinsella.

Published in Australian Literary Studies 33.3