AustLit
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Notes
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Published 2007.
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Contents indexed selectively.
Contents
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'A Vision through the Smoky Haze' : Viewing Corroboree in Selected Australian Novels,
single work
criticism
(p. 31-54)"Fiction portraying the experiences of Australian Indigenous people often contains depictions of the 'corroboree'. This representation commonly conveys a scenario in which Indigenous people dance while being watched by white spectators. This establishes a relationship between seeing and knowing that locates power in the hands of the white observers. Later in this century, both non-Indigenous, then more typically Indigenous authors, deconstruct the power structures at work in these portrayals." (31)
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A Haunted Land,
single work
criticism
(p. 139-153)'Since the nineteenth century, Australian art and writing has had a double vision of the country, as a sunny land of opportunity, and as a place of loneliness and loss. [...] Recent fiction by white writers has, like Lawson, shown an awareness of the strangeness of the land, but it locates this strangeness more directly in the brutality and defeats of settlement. The sufferings of both settlers and of those they violently displaced continue to haunt their successors' (139). The paper examines the nature of this haunting in recent novels by white Australian writers.
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The Echo of Anzac's Cooee : The Creation, Dissemination and Impact of Digger Culture,
single work
criticism
(p. 189-208)
'The soldiers of the First AIF - who would eventually become known as "diggers" - constructed a self-consciously "Australian" folk culture. It was a culture that had significance for those who created it and which also projected a particular representation of Australian-ness to "others", particularly the British. Digger folk culture was created in the hothouse of the First AIF with elements derived from the bush and larrikin traditions together with the unprecedented experiences of the war itself. Initially an oral culture, it quickly moved into the more formal media of the trench newspaper and soldier journals [...]. Digger culture also formed the basis of the institutionalised Anzac tradition. Undergoing various transformations, the culture of the digger and the tradition of Anzac have remained a complex and powerful mythology at the heart of Australian identity, continuing to influence the ways Australians understand themselves as a nation and how they project that understanding to the rest of the world' (189-190). The paper examines the origins of digger culture from 1915 and traces its development and continuing impact.
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Projecting Australia to Children : Marion Halligan's The Midewife's Daughters,
single work
criticism
(p. 255-264)"This paper discusses Marion Halligan's children's book The Midwife's Daughters. It focuses on how the daughters embody all that is best of Australia as it is projected to children in this short text: cleanliness, health, strength, freedom and liberty. The daughters are read as descendants of Louisa Lawson's bush-girls, whom she called a race of splendid women. It concludes by drawing attention to what the paper calls maidship, as a valuable alternative to the dominant idea of mateship." (255)
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The Overlanders at Home and Abroad,
single work
criticism
(p. 339-350)The paper discusses the making and reception of the popular film The Overlanders and its representation of Australia. It argues that the involvement of writer Dora Birtles led to more positive images of women in the bush than was common at the time, but also that the film provides more positive representation of Indigenous Australian than Birtles's later novelisation.
