AustLit

'From the 16th century on, the great Southern continent figured in the European literary and political imagination as a field for utopian thought. While we might expect such Arcadian essays to tail off as the colonisation of Australia proceeded apace in the late 18th, early 19th centuries, such was not the case: there are many examples of utopian literature set in Australia in the 19th and 20th centuries, and several examples from the 1830s , the period examined in this article. This article explores the utopian elements in the work of three near contemporaries: Edward G. Wakefield (1796-1862), Thomas J. Maslen (1787-1857) and James Vetch (1789-1869) who mapped onto Australia political and social projects that had their origin and rationale in objectives for reform in the mother country. They brought to their self-appointed task underlying assumptions and biases that reveal a range of influences, not least those of colonial expansionism, and an imperial disregard for the realities of the terrain and inhabitants of a country they had never visited. The article undertakes a close reading of the maps, systems of nomenclature and division of territory proposed by two of the three: Maslen and Vetch, and their underlying rationale and function. Both writers sought to redraw the map of Australia in order to advance projects for reform, imposing on an ‘empty land’ principles of division and sub-division claimed to be rational and scientific and yet essentially utopian.'

Source: Abstract.

'Rare during the twentieth century, at least twenty-nine book-length memoirs of Australians in France have been published since 2000. Unlike their British and American counterparts, these are overwhelmingly written by women, staying as often as not in Paris as in rural France. The relocation inevitably provides the opportunity for reinvention of the self in relation to new surroundings.

'Striking is the desire among many of these writers to claim a French identity, as evidenced in titles such as: Almost French, How to Be French, My French Life. The paper seeks to understand what enables Frenchness to appear as readily accessible to this group of Australian women and what this version of Frenchness entails. It investigates what constitutes cultural belonging in these memoirs, and the ‘technologies of the self’ by means of which this new identity is crafted, assumed and circulated as a template for others to follow. Curiously, neither a high level of French language proficiency nor long-term residence are considered essential attributes. More often, the authors focus on the availability of alternative forms of female subjectivity, and the invention of a transcultural self is articulated in terms of cultural paradigms of femininity and gender relations.'

Source: Abstract.