AustLit

'Colonial Australian Fiction: Character Types, Social Formations and the Colonial Economy (2017), by Ken Gelder and Rachael Weaver, is published within the Sydney University Press’ Sydney Studies in Australian Literature series, which aims to reinvigorate the study of Australian literature both locally and internationally. Gelder and Weaver combine their expertise in Australian literary studies to produce a rich study of character types in colonial Australian fiction, including how these types evolve and mutate over time and reveal what was taking place in colonial Australian society, especially in terms of structures of power, influence, and the economic landscape. This book adds to Gelder and Weaver’s already significant contribution to reviving interest in the rich archive of colonial Australian fiction and what it reveals about Australia’s history and continually evolving sense of national and cultural identity.'  (Publication abstract)

'In her loose collection of travel stories, Footloose in Australia (1973), Patsy Adam-Smith writes that Tasmanians bear little relationship to Australians: “Their folk culture is different, their struggles have been different; their pace, outlook, and environment are so different that they are a separate people, as tough and tenacious as the ‘mainlanders’ [...] but different” (32). This essay examines Adam-Smith’s Tasmanian travel stories, many of which were printed in the influential magazine Walkabout. It situates Adam-Smith’s stories in relation to the field of middlebrow writing and its wide sphere of influence at the time of Walkabout’s run (1934–1974), drawing from her Walkabout articles, travel books and two volumes of autobiography. An examination of Adam-Smith’s travel writing raises questions of gender and spatiality. While Adam-Smith boldly asserted her presence in marginalised space as a female traveller, her texts demonstrate the unstable discursive position occupied by women in mid-twentieth-century Australia. This essay considers how Adam-Smith’s movement beyond the private (and feminised) space of the home reflects and challenges predominantly masculine performances of space.'

Source: Abstract.

'The "story of a journey ... a picture of the country ... a record ...,": Henrietta Drake-Brockman saw herself giving fellow Australians through her contributions to Walkabout magazine during the twentieth century. Along with Drake-Brockman several other well-known Australian female authors made regular contributions to Walkabout; including Ernestine Hill, Mary Durack and Patsy Adam-Smith. They wrote about their firsthand experiences of often remote parts of Australia, describing the landscape, the people who dwelt in it and their achievements for the edification of the largely urban readership of this popular magazine. These women wrote with enthusiasm and curiosity about the country in which they had been born. Still a young nation forming and forging an identity in the face of harsh beginnings and catastrophic world events, Australia in the mid 1900s was no longer a convict or pioneer nation, but what was it? This paper discusses representations of country in the articles of two of the female contributors to Walkabout magazine: Ernestine Hill and Henrietta Drake-Brockman. These writers saw Australia as both "grim and fascinating"; a vast land of opportunity to be "possessed" and made "productive" to the economic advantage of its inhabitants. As such they provide an intriguing insight into the development of the nation, and contributed to processes of inscription during the period of Walkabout's run (1934 - 1974).' (Publication summary)