AustLit

'One of the many rewritings of Australian Henry Lawson’s iconic 1892 short story “The Drover’s Wife” is the 2016 play The Drover’s Wife, written by Aboriginal actor, writer, and director Leah Purcell. Purcell’s rewriting evidences a much more significant presence of Indigeneity. The play not only introduces Yadaka, an Aboriginal fugitive, as a key character, but the drover’s wife herself is revealed to have Indigenous origins. This powerful twist offers several implications: a tour de force of frontier violence with disturbing and haunting images of racism, rape, lynching, and murder, the play confronts the foundations of the literary canon and of settler belonging, providing an alternative to both. Borrowing Fiona Probyn-Rapsey’s term “kin-fused”, this close reading of the play’s text argues that its resolution implies a critique of Indigenous–settler reconciliation, pointing to a lingering desire to redress colonial violence, desire embodied in the play by a “kin-fused” revenge.' (Publication abstract)

'In this interview conducted via Zoom in Sydney in November 2020, the Sri Lankan-born Australian fiction writer Michelle de Kretser talks about her identity as an immigrant writer. In particular, she discusses her novels in a postcolonial context. De Kretser also talks about the way that women’s writing is flourishing in Australia. She sees the contemporary world as characterized by movement and travel, and notes the privilege on which tourism is based. She explores the way in which her work attempts to show the cultural diversity in Australia in order to overthrow the stereotyped, mistaken vision of it as a white country. Finally, de Kretser speaks of her interest in playing with the novel as a literary form and why she adopted a so-called “gimmicky” flip format for her latest novel, Scary Monsters, published in 2021.' (Publication abstract)