AustLit

Throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Australian literature was generally limited to the nationalist poetry and stories of writers like Henry Lawson and Banjo Paterson, and approved by the nationalist project of The Bulletin magazine. This is important not only for the way it underpins our understanding of Australian cultural discourses in general, but for the ways in which these inform literary value. Decades ago, Susan Sheridan argued that these cultural discourses depend on other (often gendered) binary oppositions, such as ‘outside (the bush or the city) vs inside (the domestic, the home)’, ‘Australian nationalist vs British colonial vigour’, and ‘action vs emotion’.1 What this means is that writers like Ada Cambridge and Rosa Praed ‘were denigrated as “Anglo-Australian,” “lady-novelists” whose cosmopolitan romances were considered derivative, commercial, frivolous and irrelevant to the new national literary tradition’.2 This dominant mode of thinking still influences the patterns of literary theory and criticism in the study of Australian literature today, so that these preoccupations with identity in Australian culture are necessarily coming full circle. While it is true that the 1970s and 1980s saw dominant attention being paid to feminist revisionism, uncovering ‘lost’ women and reinstating them into a literary canon, if Claiming Space for Australian Women’s Writing is any indication, this project seems to have emerged again as one of eminent importance.'  (Introduction)