AustLit

The article concentrates on Turner's allegorical portrayal of the Australian nation as a domestic space: garden, or house, or both, particularly in her novel The Ungardeners. 'Turner's later fiction, although interested in modernity and social change, retains the garden as an emblematic space, and uses it to map the impact of modernity and the shift in national allegiances from England to the United States' (285). In her earlier fiction the garden tends to be represented as a private, feminine space and is used to examine the possibilities and limitations for the female national subject. Martin argues that in The Ungardeners elements of this gendering remain but are used to a more generalised examination of national space and the place of the modern nation.