AustLit

'Madoline “Nina” Murdoch (1890–1976) was an Australian journalist, broadcaster, and writer. Among her other works, Murdoch wrote several travel books about her trips to Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. Travel to Europe from Australia was becoming increasingly accessible in the early twentieth century, and Murdoch’s books contributed to a popular discourse about Australia’s relationship both to Britain and to European civilisation more generally, as well as reflecting anxieties about women’s role in society and about industrialisation. This essay discusses the travel writing of Nina Murdoch in the context of the nature and meaning of travel to Europe – Spain in particular – for Australians in the early twentieth century, analysing how Mucrdoch’s equivocal Eurocentrism and her feminine authorial voice are inflected by changing discourses of modernity and of women’s lives.' (Publication abstract)

'Morrison's Writing Home is an important and ambitious work that among other things systematically contests two current orthodoxies: one being that Central Australia is an exemplar of Australia's enduring frontier; the other that settler Australians will always be alien to the land in which they dwell. In picking apart these shibboleths, some will no doubt proclaim Writing Home is controversial and inimical to Aboriginal aspirations and the realisation of restitution for dispossession. This would be to misread Morrison. Morrison also addresses a significant lacuna in Australian literary scholarship, that being the paucity of critical literature addressing writing of and about the Centre, despite the existence of a significant regional corpus. Given the influence of the Northern Territory in constructions of Australian identity, it is peculiar, as Morrison points out, that there is so little evaluation of the local literature informing these constructions (34). Nevertheless, his book is not a survey of this body of literature. Rather it selects key texts from different eras with which to illustrate his overarching argument. Texts selected are by those who have walked, no matter how briefly (Chatwin for example), the Central Australian places of which they write.' (Publication abstract)