AustLit

Patrick West argues: 'The primary effect of Elizabeth Jolley's novel The Newspaper of Claremont Street is a denial of any lasting Aboriginal presence on Australian land. It produces this effect by "filling the space" of potential Aboriginality with a universalized presentation of the archaic, European, economic antagonism between usury and substance.... the most objectionable thing about The Newspaper of Claremont Street is that its fundamental preoccupation is elevated into myth, making of the complete novel a powerful instrument of white colonization.' (p.65)