AustLit logo

AustLit

Sheila Collingwood-Whittick Sheila Collingwood-Whittick i(A74481 works by)
Gender: Female
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Works By

Preview all
1 Discursive Manipulations of Names and Naming in Kate Grenville's 'The Secret River' Sheila Collingwood-Whittick , 2013 single work criticism
— Appears in: Commonwealth Essays and Studies , Autumn vol. 36 no. 1 2013; (p. 21-32) 'This article stems from two observations arising from my reading of Kate Grenville's three-part exploration of Anglo-Australia's frontier history. The first is that, contrary to Grenville's averred commitment to telling the unvarnished truth about the modern nation's shameful origins, her recent historical fiction betrays a refractory tendency to portray Australia's past in a sentimental light. The second is that names and the act of naming constitute a dominant strand in the narrative weave of each of the novels. In the discussion that follows I seek to demonstrate the existence of a causal link between these two apparently unrelated observations by showing that a recurrent narratorial emphasis on the affective importance that names of places, people and things assume in the life of the colonial subject constitutes a vital element in the "empathetic history" (Gall 95) of Australia's frontier era that Grenville is intent on creating. Although this analysis can be applied to all three of Grenville's colonial novels, the present article will focus solely on the trilogy's opening volume, The Secret River - the work in which the author's discursive manipulation of names is most transparent and the ideological direction the rest of her frontier saga will follow is clearly signposted.' (Author's abstract)
1 Not Just Telling Stories: Racial Propaganda in British Imperial and Colonial Australian Literature for Children Sheila Collingwood-Whittick , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: Symbolism , vol. 10 no. 2010; (p. 93-110)
1 The Haunting of Settler Australia : Kate Grenville's The Secret River Sheila Collingwood-Whittick , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: Postcolonial Ghosts 2010; (p. 125-142) In this essay, Sheila Collingwood-Whittick states: 'Kate Grenville's The Secret River, an elegantly-written, meticulously-crafted and extremely readable novel, provides a classic example of white Australian anxiety and ambivalence over the nation's origins. More significantly perhaps, and in direct contradiction with the author's declarations about her book, The Secret River is paradigmatic both of the difficulty settler descendants have in facing some of the grim truths of colonial history, and of their consequent inability to exorcise the ghosts that haunt the national conscience.' (p. 126)
1 Ways of Seeing 'Country' : Colonial, Postcolonial, and Indigenous Perceptions of the Australian Landscape Sheila Collingwood-Whittick , 2008 single work criticism
— Appears in: LiNQ , December vol. 35 no. 2008; (p. 59-77) 'Country' to Aboriginals is a whole that includes humans along with animal, vegetable and mineral constituents. To Anglo-Celtic colonial views the Australian 'country' was harsh and alien. Autochonous inhabitants were invisible or erasable, including their part in shaping the perceived 'park-like' areas. Marketing views of Australia disappointed actual migrants. Concerns about the efffect of white re-shaping of the landscape, and environmental destruction, only appeared in the late twentieth century, and an awareness of original inhabitants' rights in the landscape is central to postcolonial ways of seeing the 'country.'
1 4 y separately published work icon The Pain of Unbelonging : Alienation and Identity in Australasian Literature Sheila Collingwood-Whittick (editor), Amsterdam New York (City) : Rodopi , 2007 Z1372369 2007 anthology criticism The essays in this volume are concerned with the literary expression of the persistent condition of alienation of Indigenous Australian and Maori peoples. They demonstrate that 'more than two hundred years after the process of colonisation was set in motion, the experience that Germaine Greer has dubbed "the pain of unbelonging" continues unabated, constituting a dominant thematic concern in the writing produced today by Australian and New Zealand authors' (publisher's blurb).
1 Mrs Roxburgh's Passage from Lady to Lubra : Racial Stereotyping and the Fantasy of Indigeneity in A Fringe of Leaves Sheila Collingwood-Whittick , 2006 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Politics and Poetics of Passage in Canadian and Australian Culture and Fiction 2006; (p. 39-56)
1 Sally Morgan's My Place : Exposing the (Ab)original 'Text' behind Whitefellas' History Sheila Collingwood-Whittick , 2002 single work criticism
— Appears in: Commonwealth , vol. 25 no. 1 2002; (p. 41-58) Author's abstract : In presenting an autobiographical account of her own and her family's life experience, Sally Morgan exposes the Aborigines' post-contact history - hitherto obliterated, 'overwritten', as all colonised peoples' histories are, by the official, historical accounts of the colonial culture. The quest for her Aboriginal identity further enables Morgan both to un- and re-cover a cultural heritage that had been deliberately obscured by the white 'script' superimposed upon it.
1 Re-presenting the Australian Aborigine : Challenging Colonialist Discourse through Autoethnography Sheila Collingwood-Whittick , 2000 single work criticism
— Appears in: World Literature Written in English , vol. 38 no. 2 2000; (p. 110-131) Author's abstract: Since the late 1980s, a steady output of life-writing has emerged from Australia's Aboriginal community. This paper - intended as an introduction to subsequent studies of particular texts - examines the socio-historic background to this literary phenomenon. It argues that the so-called 'autobiographical' writing produced by Aboriginal authors is, in fact, a form of autoethnography - an important counter-discourse to the systematic mis-representation of Aborigines that whites have used to justify their su/o-ppression of Australia's indigenous peoples.
X