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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'This thesis conducts a discourse analysis of the 'white vanishing trope' - stories about white Australians who become lost or disappear - in white Australian texts from 1789 to 2006...[T]he white vanishing trope narrates a specific, and remarkably constant, relationship between indigenous bodies, white bodies, time, and space, in which white settlers are victims and survivors, whose occupation of Australia is constructed as inevitable and right.' - from author's abstract (p.ix)
Notes
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Also includes an analysis of Robert Wainwright's journalistic account of the 1993 disappearacne of Clinton Liebelt.
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PhD Thesis, School of English, Media Studies and Art History ,University of QLD.
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Related Works
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y
White Vanishing : Rethinking Australia’s Lost-in-the-Bush Myth
Amsterdam
New York (City)
:
Rodopi
,
2012
Z1904391
2012
single work
criticism
'The story of the vulnerable white person vanishing without trace into the harsh Australian landscape is a potent and compelling element in multiple genres of mainstream Australian culture. It has been sung in Little Boy Lost, brought to life on the big screen in Picnic at Hanging Rock, immortalized in Henry Lawson's poems of lost tramps, and preserved in the history books' tales of Leichhardt or Burke and Wills wandering in mad circles.
A world-wide audience has also witnessed the many-layered and oddly strident nature of Australian disappearance symbolism in media coverage of contemporary disappearances, such as those of Azaria Chamberlain and Peter Falconio.
White Vanishing offers a revealing and challenging re-examination of Australian disappearance mythology, exposing the political utility at its core. Drawing on wide-ranging examples of the white-vanishing myth, the book provides evidence that disappearance mythology encapsulates some of the most dominant and durable categories at the heart of white Australian culture, and that many of those ideas have their origin in colonial mechanisms of inequality and oppression.
White Vanishing deliberately (and perhaps controversially) reminds readers that, while power is never absolute or irresistible, some narrative threads carry a particularly authoritative inheritance of ideas and power-relations through time.' Source: http://www.rodopi.nl/ (Sighted 03/12/2012).
Last amended 13 Aug 2010 13:47:18
Subjects:
- Aquifer 2000 single work short story
- Remembering Babylon 1993 single work novel
- The Bluebird Cafe 1990 single work novel
- The Creek of the Four Graves 1845 single work poetry
- Bush,
- 1789-2006
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