AustLit logo
Jane Gleeson-White Jane Gleeson-White i(A91692 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 Friday Essay : How Women Writers Helped Me Find My Voice After Divorce Jane Gleeson-White , 2023 single work column
— Appears in: The Conversation , 20 October 2023; ABC News [Online] , October 2023;
1 Enraged, Tragic and Hopeful: Alexis Wright’s New Novel Praiseworthy Explores Aboriginal Sovereignty in the Shadow of the Anthropocene Jane Gleeson-White , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: The Conversation , 4 April 2023;

— Review of Praiseworthy Alexis Wright , 2023 single work novel

Praiseworthy is Alexis Wright’s most formidable act of imaginative synthesis yet. It is simultaneously a hero’s journey for an age of global warming, a devastating story of young love caught between two laws, and an extended elegy and ode to Aboriginal law and sovereignty.' (Introduction)

1 My Mother’s Silence, My Nation’s Shame : Colonial Violence in Australia and New Guinea Jane Gleeson-White , 2022 single work autobiography
— Appears in: Griffith Review , no. 76 2022; (p. 214-227)
1 My Womb Is Not Terra Nullius Jane Gleeson-White , 2019 single work prose
— Appears in: Choice Words : A Collection of Writing about Abortion 2019;
1 Reg Dodd and Malcolm McKinnon, Talking Sideways: Stories and Conversations from Finniss Springs Jane Gleeson-White , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 19 no. 2 2019;

— Review of Talking Sideways : Stories and Conversations from Finniss Springs Reg Dodd , Malcolm McKinnon , 2019 single work autobiography
'Talking Sideways was composed from conversations which unfolded over several years between Abrunna elder Reg Dodd, and artist and writer Malcolm McKinnon, on Dodd’s ancestral land on Lake Eyre in South Australia. Told episodically in alternating voices, it is about this land, Finniss Springs, and its complex, turbulent history. Familiar episodes of white incursions into Aboriginal country—explorers, anthropologists, missionaries, pastoralists, miners, land battles, grog and associated violence—entwine with exceptions and twists particular to this place and its people. Most notable among these exceptions are Dodd’s grandparents, his Abrunna grandmother Nora Beralda, ‘a proper tribal woman,’ and Scottish pastoralist grandfather, Francis Dunbar Warren, who went to Finniss Springs in 1918. Their long and strong marriage created there for a time a rare and respectful exchange between the traditional owners and newcomers to this land. It is also an intricate mapping of this land by a traditional owner versed in its character and law, and a whitefella seduced by its beauty and its ways which have drawn him back for three decades.' (Introduction)
1 Valuing Country : Let Me Count Three Ways Jane Gleeson-White , 2019 single work essay
— Appears in: Griffith Review , January no. 63 2019; (p. 171-191)

'It was reading Alexis Wright's novel 'Carpentaria' (Giramondo, 2006) in 2007 that introduced me to the idea of 'country': land as a living being with meaning, personality, will, a temper and ancient reciprocal relationships with its people governed by law. This made sense to me. I've felt the living presence of this land and I care deeply about how we treat it. I'm especially interested in how our thinking about land shapes our behaviour towards it. And I've been preoccupied by ideas of country and two new ways of conceiving it - 'natural capital' and 'rights of nature' - that seek to address the many ecological crises currently afflicting our planet.' (Publication abstract)

1 Contested Land : Country and Terra Nullius in Plains of Promise and Benang : From the Heart Jane Gleeson-White , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 3 no. 18 2018;

'The Mabo decision of 1992 made questions about the definition of land in Australia and its relation to humans newly significant by overturning the British legal fiction of this continent as ‘terra nullius’ (empty land) and acknowledged for the first time in Anglo-Australian law the validity of Aboriginal land claims. Alexis Wright’s Plains of Promise (1997) and Kim Scott’s Benang (1999) were written in the wake of this landmark decision. Both tell stories of children of the Stolen Generations and their ancient ties to their ancestral land, despite their severance from it. Critical scholarship on these novels has focused primarily on their human stories and been conducted in terms of postcolonial theory and discussions of magic realism. In this article I seek to complicate and expand these predominantly anthropocentric readings by drawing on ecocriticism to explore the central role of the non-human world in these novels. I argue they privilege an Indigenous understanding of two regions of the Australian continent as ‘country’ over their conception as terra nullius, a blank canvass available for colonisation and inscription by British property law and Christianity. The novels contest this concept of terra nullius by manifesting ‘country’: a vibrant, active land inextricably bound to its Indigenous people by ancient, enduring laws. They rewrite the continent as black land and suggest their protagonists’ inextricable, enduring ties to it.'  (Publication abstract)

1 Properly Alive : Taboo by Kim Scott Jane Gleeson-White , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , August 2017;

'Kim Scott’s fifth novel, Taboo, is an extraordinary testament to the new energies in Aboriginal storytelling that have emerged since the 1990s, the decade the Mabo decision overturned the legal fiction of terra nullius and recognised Aboriginal land claims in Australian law for the first time. As Scott said in 2012: ‘This is an Aboriginal nation, you know. It’s black country, the continent. Some people are starting to think about: can we graft a contemporary Australian community onto its Indigenous roots?’  (Introduction)

1 Country and Climate Change in Alexis Wright's 'The Swan Book' Jane Gleeson-White , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australasian Journal of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology , no. 6 2016-2017; (p. 29-38)
'Alexis Wright’s novel, The Swan Book (2013), set one hundred years in the future on a climate-changed Earth, introduces a new note into her fiction: that of doubt about hope. Extending postcolonial discussions of Wright’s fiction, this essay uses ecocriticism to consider Country and climate change in this novel. It argues that the element of doubt about hope, of despair even, evident in The Swan Book derives from the fact that for the first time in Wright’s fiction the essence of the land—Country—has been altered, by anthropogenically-caused climate change. Drawing on the work of ecocritics Timothy Clark and Adam Trexler, the essay argues that to engage with climate change Wright has introduced formal innovations in her novel; and more overtly figured Western culture in terms of its global manifestation, that is, as Christianity conflated with capitalism. I argue that The Swan Book writes a book of Country into the Christian and other stories of the planet, telling a new story of the earth for an age of climate change.' (Publication abstract)
1 Capitalism Versus the Agency of Place : An Ecocritical Reading of That Deadman Dance and Carpentaria Jane Gleeson-White , 2013 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 13 no. 2 2013;

'Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance (2010) and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006) have put the Indigenous novel at the centre of Australian literature for the first time and established these authors as two of Australia’s most prominent and successful contemporary fiction writers. The novels have been widely acclaimed by scholars and critics; both won the Miles Franklin Award and were short-listed for major literary prizes. And yet both these novels trouble Australia’s national identity, drawing attention to and challenging the economic project—capitalism—upon which the nation is predicated. Against the singularity of the nation and the abstracting forces of capitalism these novels posit the particularity and agency of locale, of place. This paper will argue, therefore, that only an ecocritical reading of these novels can adequately account for the challenges—formal, political, epistemological, ontological—that they pose. Through an ecocritical examination of the conflict between capitalism and regional Indigenous management embodied in these novels, I will argue that they rewrite Australia in the voice of the regional, and offer ways of reconsidering the relation of human and non-human which contest our prevailing economic models and their role in the ecological crisis.'  (Introduction)

1 Going Viral : The Swan Book by Alexis Wright Jane Gleeson-White , 2013 single work essay
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , August 2013; The Australian Face : Essays from the Sydney Review of Books 2017; (p. 18-26)

'This is the saddest love story I have ever read. But not for the reasons you might imagine.

'The Swan Book is Alexis Wright’s third novel and like her first two – Plains of Promise (1997) and the Miles Franklin Award winning Carpentaria (2006) – it opens in her ancestral country, the grass plains of the Gulf of Carpentaria. It bears all the hallmarks of Wright’s astonishing narrative powers: her linguistic dexterity, mashing words and phrases from high and low culture, from English, Aboriginal languages, French and Latin; her humour and scathing satire; her fierce political purpose; her genre bending; her virtuosic gift for interweaving stories on multiple levels, from the literal to the metaphoric, the folkloric and the mythic. But The Swan Book takes all these – especially the last – to new levels. In August 2008, as part of her Oodgeroo Noonuccal Lecture, Wright said: ‘Oodgeroo absolutely understood the power of belief in the fight for sovereignty over this land – that if you could succeed in keeping the basic architecture of how you think, then you owned the freedom of your mind, that unimpeded space to store hope and feed your ability to survive.’ The Swan Book constructs this architecture of the mind – and, as with a mind, it operates in many dimensions simultaneously. It teems with songs, stories, images and fragments of culture from across the planet.'  (Introduction)

1 Books of the Year Graeme Blundell , Helen Garner , Jaya Savige , Anna Funder , Delia Falconer , Peter Craven , J. M. Coetzee , Stella Clarke , Les Carlyon , James Bradley , Jane Gleeson-White , Susan Johnson , James Ley , Ashley Hay , Leigh Sales , Alex Miller , Ramona Koval , Evelyn Juers , Peter Pierce , Nicolas Rothwell , Colm Toibin , Kirsten Tranter , Brenda Walker , Maria Tumarkin , Geordie Williamson , 2012 single work column
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 22-23 December 2012; (p. 14-15)
Leading writers and critics share their best reads for 2012.
1 The Intimacy of a Sketch Jane Gleeson-White , 2012 single work review
— Appears in: The Saturday Age , 31 March 2012; (p. 24-25)

— Review of The Hanging Garden Patrick White , 1981 single work novel
1 2012 The Year of Australian Women Writers Jane Gleeson-White , 2012 single work column
— Appears in: Overland [Online] , December 2012;
1 The Real Australian Classics and Why We Should Teach Oz Lit Courses in Our Universities Jane Gleeson-White , 2012 single work essay
— Appears in: Overland [Online] , September 2012;
1 How Mars Got Its Colour Jane Gleeson-White , 2012 single work short story children's
— Appears in: I Met a Martian and Other Stories 2012; (p. 45-48)
1 The Stella, Pub Feminism and Greek Goddesses Jane Gleeson-White , 2011 single work column
— Appears in: Overland [Online] , September 2011; Newswrite : The NSW Writers' Centre Magazine , December 2011 - January 2012 no. 200 2011; (p. 16-17)
1 Haunted Tales Jane Gleeson-White , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: Overland , Summer no. 201 2010; (p. 38-41)
'If it is possible to assess the current state of Australian literature through a reading of four novels published in September and October 2010...then I'd say Australian fiction is haunted, preoccupied with the past'. p. 38
1 Like a Cultural DNA, Stories Tell Our Souls Jane Gleeson-White , 2009 extract criticism (The Secret Life of Stories)
— Appears in: The Weekend Australian , 28 - 29 November 2009; (p. 4)
1 The Secret Life of Stories Jane Gleeson-White , 2009 single work criticism
— Appears in: Meanjin , Summer vol. 68 no. 4 2009; (p. 59-65)
X