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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'The story of the vulnerable white person vanishing without trace into the harsh Australian landscape is a potent and compelling element in multiple genres of mainstream Australian culture. It has been sung in Little Boy Lost, brought to life on the big screen in Picnic at Hanging Rock, immortalized in Henry Lawson's poems of lost tramps, and preserved in the history books' tales of Leichhardt or Burke and Wills wandering in mad circles.
A world-wide audience has also witnessed the many-layered and oddly strident nature of Australian disappearance symbolism in media coverage of contemporary disappearances, such as those of Azaria Chamberlain and Peter Falconio.
White Vanishing offers a revealing and challenging re-examination of Australian disappearance mythology, exposing the political utility at its core. Drawing on wide-ranging examples of the white-vanishing myth, the book provides evidence that disappearance mythology encapsulates some of the most dominant and durable categories at the heart of white Australian culture, and that many of those ideas have their origin in colonial mechanisms of inequality and oppression.
White Vanishing deliberately (and perhaps controversially) reminds readers that, while power is never absolute or irresistible, some narrative threads carry a particularly authoritative inheritance of ideas and power-relations through time.' Source: http://www.rodopi.nl/ (Sighted 03/12/2012).
Notes
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'Most history, when it has been digested by people, becomes myth. Myth is an arrangement of the past. whether real or imagined, in patterns that resonate with a culture's deepest values and aspirations. Myths create and reinforce archetypes so taken for granted, so seemingly axiomatic, that they go unchallenged. Myths are so fraught with meaning that we live and die by them. They are the maps by which cultures navigate through time.' (Introduction)
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Table of contents :
Preface and Acknowledgements ix Introduction
-1 The Lost-Child Trope in White Australian Narrative 21
-2 Black Displacements: The Semiosis of Indigeneitv in the White-Vanishing Trope 55
-3 White Presenting: Contamination Politics and the Policing of White Subiectivities in the White-Vanishing Trope
97
-4 Temporal Trouble: Sequential Disturbance. Ambivalence, and Inscription of Linear Time in the White-Vanishing Trope 157
-5 Entering terra nullius: The White-Vanishing Trope and the Contest for Australian Space 201
-6 White Vanishing in situ: The Semiosis of Replacement in Five Australian White-Vanishing Texts 275
-Conclusion 323
-Works Cited 333
-Index 359
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Works about this Work
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Review : White Vanishing : Rethinking Australia's Lost-in-the-bush Myth
2014
single work
review
— Appears in: Commonwealth Essays and Studies , Spring vol. 36 no. 2 2014; (p. 113-114)
— Review of White Vanishing : Rethinking Australia’s Lost-in-the-Bush Myth 2012 single work criticism -
Review : White Vanishing : Rethinking Australia's Lost-In-The-Bush Myth
2014
single work
review
— Appears in: Ariel , January - April vol. 45 no. 1/2 2014; (p. 261-263)
— Review of White Vanishing : Rethinking Australia’s Lost-in-the-Bush Myth 2012 single work criticism -
[Untitled]
2013
single work
review
— Appears in: Transnational Literature , November vol. 6 no. 1 2013;
— Review of White Vanishing : Rethinking Australia’s Lost-in-the-Bush Myth 2012 single work criticism
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[Untitled]
2013
single work
review
— Appears in: Transnational Literature , November vol. 6 no. 1 2013;
— Review of White Vanishing : Rethinking Australia’s Lost-in-the-Bush Myth 2012 single work criticism -
Review : White Vanishing : Rethinking Australia's Lost-In-The-Bush Myth
2014
single work
review
— Appears in: Ariel , January - April vol. 45 no. 1/2 2014; (p. 261-263)
— Review of White Vanishing : Rethinking Australia’s Lost-in-the-Bush Myth 2012 single work criticism -
Review : White Vanishing : Rethinking Australia's Lost-in-the-bush Myth
2014
single work
review
— Appears in: Commonwealth Essays and Studies , Spring vol. 36 no. 2 2014; (p. 113-114)
— Review of White Vanishing : Rethinking Australia’s Lost-in-the-Bush Myth 2012 single work criticism
Last amended 30 Jan 2017 12:34:11