AustLit
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'“Abroad” once evoked a feeling of returning to one's homeland or, in the case of post-war Australians, to the mother country. It was also synonymous with a distant journey or place in a foreign land. Today the expression “travelling abroad” infers notions of travel and adventure. The modern use of the word is more likely to be something fixed, or the undertaking of a meaningful activity, such as volunteering abroad or studying abroad. “Abroad” is also used in the context of charitable organisations such as Community Aid Abroad, Work Abroad and Projects Abroad. Rumours, too, can be “abroad” as they too travel widely, in and out in the open and in circulation. Further, a general sense of the care-free, of independence, excitement, imagination, endless possibilities and freedom is aroused. The modern sense of the word “abroad”—out of one's country or overseas—derives from its late fourteenth century meaning: “out of doors or away from home”. “Abroad” comes from the Old English word “on brede” meaning: “at wide.” ' (Jillian Adams, Melania Pantelich, Editorial introduction)
Contents
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Australian Women Writers Abroad,
single work
criticism
'At a time when a trip abroad was out of the reach of most women, even if they could not make the journey, Australian women could imagine “abroad” just by reading popular women’s magazines such as Woman (later Woman’s Day and Home then Woman’s Day) and The Australian Women’s Weekly, and journals, such as The Progressive Woman and The Housewife. Increasingly in the post-war period, these magazines and journals contained advertisements for holidaying abroad, recipes for international foods and articles on overseas fashions. It was not unusual for local manufacturers, to use the lure of travel and exotic places as a way of marketing their goods. Healing Bicycles, for example, used the slogan “In Venice men go to work on Gondolas: In Australia it’s a Healing” (“Healing Cycles” 40), and Exotiq cosmetics featured landscapes of countries where Exotiq products had “captured the hearts of women who treasured their loveliness: Cincinnati, Milan, New York, Paris, Geneva and Budapest” (“Exotiq Cosmetics” 36).' (Introduction)
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“Glossary Islands” as Sites of the “Abroad” in Post-Colonial Literature : Towards a New Methodology for Language and Knowledge Relations in Keri Hulme’s The Bone People and Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby,
single work
'Reviewing Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby (2013), Eve Vincent notes that it shares with Keri Hulme’s The Bone People (1984) one significant feature: “a glossary of Indigenous words.” Working with various forms of the term “abroad”, this article surveys the debate The Bone People ignited around the relative merits of such a glossary in texts written predominantly in English, the colonizing language. At stake here is the development of a post-colonial community that incorporates Indigenous identity and otherness (Maori or Aboriginal) with the historical legacy of the English/Indigenous-language multi-lingualism of multi-cultural Australia and New Zealand. I argue that the terms of this debate have remained static since 1984 and that this creates a problem for post-colonial theory. Specifically, the debate has favoured a binary either/or approach, whereby either the Indigenous language or English has been empowered with authority over the text’s linguistic, historical, cultural and political territory. Given that the significations of “abroad” include a travelling encounter with overseas places and the notion of being widely scattered or dispersed, the term has value for an investigation into how post-colonialism as a historical circumstance is mediated and transformed within literature. Post-colonial literature is a response to the “homeland” encounter with a foreign “abroad” that creates particular wide scatterings or dispersals of writing within literary texts.' (Introduction)
