AustLit

'The ocean as a border in Australia has been gaining increasing attention, not only with the arrival of asylum seekers by boat and the relentless government policies to prevent this, but also the connections with Asia that Australia's part of Oceania suggests. Recent scholarship by critics such as Elizabeth DeLoughrey, Suvendrini Perera, and Elizabeth McMahon explore the way representations of oceans can evoke, on the one hand, this doubled sense of insularity and threat, but on the other possibility and connection. Despite the ocean's dominant presence and the way it frames conflict and intimate moments, scholarship on Simone Lazaroo's The Australian Fiance has frequently focused on the way the novel deals with racism in Australia via the Eurasian woman's experience of the White Australia Policy. Here, McFarlane examines the depiction of the sea in Lazaroo's novel as it engages with a kind of insularity with reflection and connective possibility in relation to globalization.' (Publication abstract)