AustLit

'Linking auditory and animal history, this article examines the kookaburra's transformation from a 'bird of evil' to a symbol of and way of hearing nation. From the early colonial period, responses to the bird's aurality and behaviour were highly ambivalent and negative discourses in relation to the kookaburra continued well into the twentieth century. Yet the interwar years became the 'heyday' of the kookaburra as a symbol. The analysis focuses not on the use of the kookaburra as a visual icon in this period but on the kookaburra's growing aural power and presence. Here, discussion is particularly concerned with the role of new mass communication media in integrating nation with nature via the kookaburra. Central to this is the story of Jacko, the 'Broadcasting Kookaburra', a narrative that not only helps to explain the bird's ascent in national consciousness but also the limits to that identification.' [Author's abstract]

'This article reassesses nineteenth-century representations of Britain's geographical 'antipodes' by looking at the figure of the returnee. While mid-Victorian sensation fiction expressed a redirected imperial panic by producing popular impostor plots, the resulting typecasting of the antipodal returnee as an intrinsically threatening figure increasingly prompted authors to react critically to this easy sensationalisation. Simultaneously, a new craze for impostor narratives was inspired by real-life scandals such as, most prominently, the Tichborne Claimant, an Australian butcher who claimed to be the lost heir to an aristocratic family. The case inspired a range of popular representations: from street ballads to heated debates about class issues and a number of novels, both in the metropolitan centre and in the settler colonies. My Young Alcides (1875) by the religious, didactic writer Charlotte Yonge, I argue, offers a revealing case study of domestic fiction's reaction to the easy appropriation and typecasting of 'down under' as a sensational space.' [Author's abstract]

'In the mid-nineteenth century, the frontiers of Queensland and British Columbia provided a stage on which British men could enact or perform manliness. Encouraged by a range of cultural productions, thousands of British men went to these colonies to act out the courage, stoicism and perseverance demanded by the cult of manliness. In so doing they hoped to achieve their manly independence. From the exploits of these men sprang the frontier myths that are so popular in modern Australian and Canadian society. However, for many men, the frontier could be a troubling and unsettling place, and for them the pursuit of manly independence could be problematic. Their stories demonstrate that manliness could be a hollow ideal, dependent on and varying according to social and physical conditions. The Queensland and British Columbia frontiers were places where 'manliness' was an important ideal but a problematic practice.' [Author's abstract]

'Two significant works about Australia from the mid-nineteenth century, Godfrey Mundy's Our Antipodes (1852) and Australia Terra Cognita (1855–6) by William Blandowski, reveal interesting contrasting modes of vision and strategies of visual representation. As signalled by the “Our” of his title, Mundy sees the southern continent largely as a British possession, a suitable destination for Britain's excess population. His entertaining and informative travel narrative, illustrated with fifteen lithographs based on twelve of the author's own sketches plus three by his wife, was well-reviewed with one critic arguing that text and images combined to effectively convey the results of the exercise of Mundy's “observant eye in a strange land”. Blandowski's title suggests that knowledge has replaced the ignorance of earlier centuries and that the provision of information is the principal aim of his illustrations. However, along with scientific details, the landscape plates are richly embellished with “effects” by engraver James Redaway. Tiny figures, both Aboriginal and European, add a narrative dimension. This article will analyse narrative and visual effects as well as point of view in both sets of images, suggesting some perhaps unexpected similarities, but also important differences at this pivotal stage in the history of the southern continent.' Source: Kerry Heckenberg.

'Most European, Asian and Middle Eastern literatures explicitly acknowledge the nexus between national or regional poetics and forms of religious mysticism. Despite equivalents in the English, American and European poetries from which it is initially derived, an Australian Christian mystical poetics has never been explicitly examined—possibly due to its interdisciplinary character—despite ample evidence for its existence. This paper examines the earliest, often forgotten constructions of what an Australian mystical poetics might entail with particularly emphasis on the erotics of the unknown land, its satirical detractors, and proponents of a contemplative ideal into the post-Federation era.' Source; Toby Davidson.