'In the mid-1840s, a thirteen-year-old boy, Gemmy Fairley, is cast ashore in the far north of Australia and taken in by Aborigines. Sixteen years later, when settlers reach the area, he moves back into the world of Europeans, men and women who are staking out their small patch of home in an alien place, hopeful and yet terrified of what it might do to them.
Given shelter by the McIvors, the family of the children who originally made contact with him, Gemmy seems at first to be guaranteed a secure role in the settlement, but there are currents of fear and mistrust in the air. To everyone he meets - from George Abbot, the romantically aspiring young teacher, to Mr Frazer, the minister, whose days are spent with Gemmy recording the local flora; from Janet McIvor, just coming to adulthood and discovering new versions of the world, to the eccentric Governor of Queensland himself - Gemmy stands as a different kind of challenge, as a force which both fascinates and repels. And Gemmy himself finds his own whiteness as unsettling in this new world as the knowledge he brings with him of the savage, the Aboriginal.' - Publisher's blurb (Chatto & Windus, 1993).
'Since 2009, Australian author David Malouf’s texts have been included and then excluded from key courses in Indian universities. Malouf’s place in the curriculum (particularly that of An Imaginary Life [1978]) relates to pedagogical and intellectual negotiations with postcolonial theory – especially debates about the inclusion of white settler literatures. It also should be seen in the context of the country’s emergent (hyper)nationalist political imagination. Referring to the influential course “New Literatures in English” offered by University of Delhi’s English department, this article argues that the selection of Malouf texts by Indian English departments indicates not only ongoing debates in postcolonial thought, but also a preference for postcolonial texts that can be read through essentializing lenses. It proposes Malouf’s later novel Remembering Babylon (1993) as a productive text through which to discuss the limitations of using deterministic cultural markers in the creation of a postcolonial Indian imaginary.' (Publication abstract)
(Introduction)
'The article offers information about author David Malouf. It mentions that Malouf has extolled the complication of women in ancient Greek drama and written the book "Remembering Babylon" about Australian settlement. It also mentions that there was a grand push to triumphalise Australian literature post Bicentennial.' (Publication abstract)
'This is the first in-depth, broad-based study of the impact of the Australian High Court’s landmark Mabo decision of 1992 on Australian fiction. More than any other event in Australia’s legal, political and cultural history, the Mabo judgement – which recognised indigenous Australians’ customary native title to land – challenged previous ways of thinking about land and space, settlement and belonging, race and relationships, and nation and history, both historically and contemporaneously. While Mabo’s impact on history, law, politics and film has been the focus of scholarly attention, the study of its influence on literature has been sporadic and largely limited to examinations of non-Aboriginal novels.
'Now, a quarter of a century after Mabo, this book takes a closer look at nineteen contemporary novels – including works by David Malouf, Alex Miller, Kate Grenville, Thea Astley, Tim Winton, Michelle de Kretser, Richard Flanagan, Alexis Wright and Kim Scott – in order to define and describe Australia’s literary imaginary as it reflects and articulates post-Mabo discourse today. Indeed, literature’s substantial engagement with Mabo’s cultural legacy – the acknowledgement of indigenous people’s presence in the land, in history, and in public affairs, as opposed to their absence – demands a re-writing of literary history to account for a “Mabo turn” in Australian fiction. ' (Publication summary)
This article examines the portrayal of settlers as consciously differentiating their whiteness from what they regard as inferior races and cultures and discusses white Australia's process of reconciliation with Aboriginal Australia.