AustLit

'This essay examines two very different Australian literary representations of the event and the site of Hiroshima Nam Les short story "Hiroshima" presents the time leading up to the American bombing of Hiroshima through the unknowing eyes of a child , who will witness the event in the final moments of the narrative. By contrast, Shirley Hazzard, in her fiction and her public writing, represents the period after the bombing through the eyes of Europeans—that is to say, Britons and Australian—visiting the ruined city, basing these observations on her oval experience of visiting the site in 1947. My interest in this essay is with the tensions between these two literary events, separated in time and cohering around a bleariest event that happens outside the frame of the narrative in both cases, and the ways they highlight some of the complications of national literary forms and representations. This point is compounded by the divergences between the two earth , both acclaimed in Australia and internationally. Nam Le arrived in Australia with his family as a child, a refugee, while Hazzard left at age sixteen and insists that she has no obvious or literal homeland. The work of both authors is characterised by global topographies and imaginings; however, Le tells us that the diverse locations of his fiction are based in research, while Hazzard's narratives are demonstrably based on her own experiences.' (Introduction)