AustLit

'This article discusses the vision behind the Jindyworobak movement in terms of its complex interplay between progressive utopianism and ideological regression. The Jindyworobaks, an Australian literary movement of the twentieth century, sought a deeper connection with the Australian environment based on appreciation and a willingness to learn from its indigenous traditions. At the same time, however, their writings still deny the Aboriginal subaltern a voice, and effectively perpetuate the power structures the Jindyworobaks seemingly oppose. This intriguing interplay forms the basis of this article, which draws on a conceptual framework inspired by Paul Ricœur, Ernst Bloch and Slavoj Zizek to map out the interactions between utopia and ideology in the vision of the Jindyworobaks.' (Publication abstract)

'This essay offers an analysis and interpretation of Peter Goldsworthy’s Three Dog Night (2003) as post-Mabo fiction. In doing so its broader aim is to expand the definition of post-Mabo fiction and to argue that no single historical event in recent decades has transformed the Australian literary imaginary more than the High Court’s Mabo decision of 1992. I concede that Goldsworthy’s text does not directly thematise the Mabo decision or native title. But in the portrayal of characters’ everyday conversations, their discussions about art, history and the land, the text engages with post-Mabo discourses, that is to say, with the recognition of indigenous people’s presence in the land, in history, and in political and social affairs, as opposed to their absence. Scholars in various fields of study—history, law, geography, film—have acknowledged the broad influence of Mabo in cultural production; literary scholars have too, though less so by way of close readings of specific texts. The examination of Three Dog Night, offered here, suggests Mabo’s impact on fiction writing is more widespread and more sustained than generally considered.' (Publication abstract)

'The article considers Tim Winton’s fiction in terms of its cross- and transcultural character. Despite the fact that local Australian settings permeate the writer’s narratives, Winton creates an imaginary space that is both local and transnational in terms of its quality of the domestic culture, which Winton extends beyond its original field of practice. Winton achieves the transcultural quality of his fiction through transgressions and boundary breaking that are possible due to his frequent reworking of the traditional Australian themes and concepts of the unknown, supernatural, mystical, numinous and sacred, exploitation of leitmotifs of journey, transit and in-betweenness, use of cross-cultural symbols as well as various utopian and dystopian topoi such as Arcadia and Heimat.' (Publication abstract)

'Like other postcolonial writers, the contemporary author Murray Bail has manifested a persistent concern with the relationship between the notion of place, which has thematically dominated Australian literature since its inception, and the issue of cultural identity at large. In the footsteps of Patrick White, his literary mentor, Bail has, in particular, repeatedly sought to dispel the so-called myth of the Great Australian Emptiness and the various cultural stereotypes it has ramified into, with a view to demonstrating that his homeland has more to offer than the geographical and ontological blankness to which it has all too often been reduced. In Bail's work, the construction of an alternative national mythology arguably proceeds from a radical reconceptualisation of the local landscape. As a visual writer, he has notably tended to rely on the motif of the straight line (seen as a Western legacy) not only to reconfigure the Australian space, but also to position himself towards the old imperial power. In this essay, I propose to outline the paradigmatic shift apparent in Bail's fiction, from his early writings, in which his view of space admittedly remains either mythical or dual, to more recent texts that can be said to transcend previous representational stereotypes and binaries. In this context, I intend to show that while Holden's Performance (his second novel published in 1987) opposes-to parodic ends-highly geometric urban centres to non-linear natural environments, Eucalyptus (1998) and The Pages (2008) seem to gesture towards a more inclusive kind of spatial imagination, which strives to embrace linearity (i.e. to incorporate it into more complex re-mappings of Australia) instead of merely discarding it.' (Publication abstract)

'From 1790, a small but significant number of free wives accompanied or followed their convict husbands to the penal colony of New South Wales. Through the case study of Sarah Wills Howe, a free wife of a convict, the unique power and capabilities exercised by these women is explored, particularly in relation to their legal and economic agency. According to the common law doctrine of coverture a married woman had no independent legal existence and no economic or legal rights, these having ceded to her husband upon marriage with whom she was "one person in law." The unique legal position of free wives of convicts stands as a rare exception to the legal incapacity of coverture and yet this group of married women and their significance has been largely overlooked by historians. The story of Sarah Wills Howe points to the more nuanced capacity and experience of married women in the earliest years of settlement.' (Publication abstract)

'Focusing on contemporary writing of first-generation Serbian migrants to Australia who write in the Serbian language, this paper addresses two distinct albeit related issues which arise from different meanings of the term topos. Australia, as represented in Serbian migrant writing, is firstly discussed as "a place"-both as a particular physical space or geographical location and as a place of the mind. Various literary conventions are then identified - such as the prevalence of a particular genre, motifs or figures of speech-and their implications further analysed in terms of their pertinence to the perception of Australia in the creative writing of first-generation Serbian migrant writers who write in Serbian. As a particular physical space, Australia is unmistakably situated by way of the North-South binary opposition, with the "Southern Sky" becoming a commonplace (topos) of Serbian migrant literature. Also, it is a place surrounded by the South Seas which serves to "drown all hopes." Thus Australia as a place of the mind emerges as one of loneliness, solitude, isolation and suffering. The elegy, with its topos of comparison of the past and present, proves to be the dominant genre in the poetry which laments the loss of homeland, youth, friends, and love. An invocation of nature (as expounded by Ernst Robert Curtius in his European Literatures and the Latin Middle Ages) is deployed with the topoi such as the autumn-spring binary or the metaphors and poetic images of grey clouds, cobwebs, lost bees, cold skies, foreign flowers, marooned ships and lost anchors. Strikingly, the homeland is imagined as a loving mother whereas Australia, by implication, becomes a cruel foster parent whose actions of "taming" (i.e. assimilating) have to be resisted, making Serbs along with the Greeks and Italians "slow assimilators" as observed by Donald Horne in The Lucky Country.'

'This paper examines three memoirs written by Polish gold diggers Seweryn Korzeliński, Bolesław Dolański and Sygurd Wiśniowski with the aim of showing how each of them portrayed East Australian colonial societies and their ethnic composition in the 1850s and 1860s. The authors' reading and explanation of Antipodean social realities are strongly anchored in their earlier experiences, particularly their political and cultural formation in the historical context of their partitioned homeland, their participation in the military struggle for its independence and contribution to European national uprisings and movements. This, as well as the fact that they addressed their observations and opinions to their countrymen, and tailored them accordingly, make them interesting and point to the importance of this outsiders' representation of colonial Australia. Therefore, the article brings into focus this particular perspective, with an emphasis on its presentation of ethnic diversity and reflection of early Polish-Australian intercultural encounters.' (Publication abstract)