AustLit

'Our paper broadly concerns the distinction of our cinematic heroines, Cora in Age of Consent (dir. Michael Powell 1969) and Nim of Nim's Island (d. Mark Levin and Jennifer Flackett, 2008), from the more typical 'bush women' of Australian cinema and literature. The figure of our title, the 'girl with the bush knife', is a kind of marine creature, vividly captured in Age of Consent beneath tropical waters, mermaid-like but arguably a modified mermaid, while Nim of Nim's Island is an androgynous child adventurer descended from a swag of male mariners, whose several accessories include a bush knife. Their appearances in films 40 years apart are as much the object of inquiry in this paper as the femininities they perform, in that these films also represent minor milestones in Australian cinema at points at which the film industry has undergone change. The contexts of these changes are somehow signified, we suggest, by the use of tropical locations and settings, and we are therefore drawing attention to the way these female characters are accompanied by the spectacle of the tropical place in its difference from the more mythologised bush and desert landscapes of Australian mise-en-scene. Indeed, both Age of Consent and Nim's Island use locations in Queensland to fictionalize settings that are either in or towards Queensland, and both adapt the well established symbology of Eden, paradise and epic journey, that are defined in studies of Queensland in film and television by Bruce Molloy (1990) and Albert Moran (2001). But whereas Molloy and Moran largely concentrate on films produced by Australian interests within the ambit of a local film industry, our films are both instances of films made by international interests, with a degree of local involvement and capital, on visitations to 'locations less used', namely North and Far North Queensland.' (Author's abstract)

'This article combines the voice of an academic with that of a writer/author who is also a native of North Queensland, and one who, less commonly, publishes non-realist, or speculative fiction. This area, now often called specific in Australia, covers the genres of science fiction, or SF, fantasy, and horror. Here I will examine the way in which the three forms' generic protocols and markets can intersect with the establishment of a North Queensland writer's regional and/or gendered voice.' (Author's abstract)

'In 2001, Geoffrey Blainey argued that "a high proportion" of non-Indigenous Australians have developed a sense of place, "of feeling at home" in their country, that "has in part been created or manufactured". Though historians have contributed to this, he says, "Painters and writers have done most to create it" as "They tried to provide a sense of belonging, and a sense of continuity and history" (Boyer Lecture n. pag.). Several recent Australian novels - each with some historical basis - are set in Queensland's north and offer contemporary perceptions of the area's history from settlement to the end of the twentieth century. Published the year after the Mabo Decision, and Prime Minister Paul Keating's "Redfern Speech", David Malouf's 1993 novel, Remembering Babylon, is a fitting point to commence exploring depictions of settler society's relations to northern Queensland. Three other novels included in this study are Alex Miller's Journey to the Stone Country (2003), and Landscape of Farewell (2007), along with Gordon Smith's Dalrymple (2006). In these stories northern settlers struggle to cope - physically, psychologically and emotionally. The difficulties for settlers in developing an attachment to north Queensland, and their sometimes extreme responses, illustrate the powerful interaction between place, belonging and identity. '