AustLit

'The Commandant (1975) is an underrated work, not only in relation to Jessica Anderson's oeuvre but also in the wider context of Australian literature. This novel, set in the Moreton Bay penal station in 1830, appeared at a time when a number of significant historical novels, like Patrick White's A Fringe of Leaves, Thomas Keneally's The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith and Thea Astley's A Kindness Cup were challenging central myths of white settlement in Australia (Sheridan, 7-20). Among convict novels it stands out on account of its focus on the gaolers as themselves prisoners of the penal system, and in particular on the middle-class women whose lives were defined by their involvement in that system, through their menfolk. (Author's abstract)

'Gay men have a significant presence in Jessica Anderson's novels. From the first, An Ordinary Lunacy (1963), to her final work One of the Wattlebirds (1994), gay men appear as friends, assistants, confidants, "comrades", family members and in one instance as a fiance, of her central women characters. An Ordinary Lunacy presents arguably the first modern gay man in Australian literature, while Taking Shelter (1989), Anderson's most sexually ambiguous work, is the first Australian novel to concern itself with HIV/AIDS. In the award-winning and best-selling Tirra Lirra by the River (1978) gay men play pivotal roles. Unlike some of Anderson's contemporaries whose queerness has been explored by literary scholars - such as Patrick White or David Malouf - the rich array of queer representations in Anderson's oeuvre has been largely ignored. In light of this critical neglect this essay examines Anderson's representations of gay men and more generally non-normative sexualities. In particular, I argue that the queerness of Anderson's fiction offers the reader a nuanced and astute critique of the ways in which heterosexuality is privileged, fashioned and maintained as "natural" within late-twentieth-century Australian culture.' (Author's abstract)

At the midpoint of Christina Stead's first novel, Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), Baruch urges Catherine to "go abroad, if you can... Get a real cause to fight about" (150). In this and subsequent exchanges Baruch emphasizes the need to go beyond symbolic or grandiloquent gestures, to know for instance the actual role of the Kuomintang in China, not merely to pin on its badge, or to side with armed forces, and not just the Salvation Army to scandalize friends (150). The advice was timely for youth struggling to choose between rival ideologies, programs and panacea, in a century which, with hindsight, appears "littered with Utopian schemes" (Hughes 164). At its outset labour and suffragette movements campaigned for greater rights for depressed social groups, while technological advances raised the prospect of a future in which disease and poverty might be banished, fulfilling work and leisure realizable. Then came the successful October Revolution in 1917, which gave Communism a permanent homeland, in which alternatives to democracy and capitalism could be explored. Also the brutal, dehumanizing experience of the Great War led to calls for radical renewal and social reform, for a reshaping of the inner man and his physical environment. During the inter-war years Europe and America witnessed a host of utopian ventures in the cultural and political spheres, from mass-produced furniture and fixtures, to cities of the future like Le Corbusier's "ville radieuse" or Vladimir Tatlin's designs intended to embody Soviet dynamism and dialectical processes, from popularist political movements, such as Upton Sinclair's crusade to end poverty in California and Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, to the totalitarian super-states of Hitler and Stalin. Stead was swept up and buffeted by these historical currents, considered rival nostrums, and left a crucial but neglected commentary on many of the great utopian projects of her time, which underpinned her verdict on the contemporary plight of women.' (Author's abstract)

'In the opening pages of Eve Langley's best-loved work, The Pea-Pickers (1942), Eve and her sister June adopt male names, showy masculine attire, and "[u]nder the dark interest of the travellers around [them]" board the train for Gippsland (11). The theatricality and performativity of "Steve's" actions in these pages is maintained at a high pitch throughout the novel and, in fact, throughout Langley's novelistic oeuvre. Steve (and Eve in the later novels set in New Zealand) is a highly theatrical character, and as such, her representations often suggest those acts and practices most typical of theatricality: "role-playing, illusion, false appearance, masquerade, facade, and impersonation" (Davis and Postlewait 4). The contradictory manifestations of excess and emptiness are frequently associated with the theatrical; theatricality is often defined as an excess of expressive means (that may need containment), but it is also commonly viewed in terms of an artificiality that invokes that which may not exist, or may not be true (Davis and Postlewait 4). In her well-known formulation of performativity, Judith Butler argues that repetition of a discourse actually produces the phenomena that it seeks to control (xii). In Langley's novels, the performativity of her narrator is expressed not just in speech acts but also in what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls the "minimal, in fact non verbal, performative utterance" (xvii). (Author's abstract)

'The much-maligned character of Felix Shaw in Elizabeth Harrower's The Watch Tower (1966) has consistently been described as the "embodiment of total inexplicable evil", "of motiveless malignity"; he is a caricature of a violent, sadistic and misogynistic husband who tortures his wife Laura, and her younger sister Clare, into submission (Clancy 463). Harrower charts Laura and Clare's gradual disintegration within the prison of their suburban house overlooking Sydney harbour, a gradual unraveling towards "craven, total submission", which ultimately results in Clare being granted a form of freedom at her sister's expense (Harrower 89). Much of the criticism on Harrower stems from the 1980s and 1990s, when her work was taken up by feminists eager to hold up The Watch Tower as a lesson on the oppression of women in the post-war period. From this perspective Harrower's construction of Felix serves as a warning, a modern fairy tale that exposes the sadistic impulses of patriarchy, and the prison of the suburban domestic space. A telling case in point is the essay "What Does Women Mean? Reading, Writing and Reproduction" (1983), in which leading critic Sneja Gunew argues that The Watch Tower is structured as an "elaborate cautionary tale", a reworking of the classic "gothic [narrative] in which women are traditionally caged up and their lives threatened" (119). The text is "a salutary lesson", with Clare's ability to escape Felix's grasp high lighting the importance of maintaining the integrity of female selfhood, despite the way the text deliberately denies the reader any form of cohesive resolution or satisfactory solution at the end of the novel (119). So, too, in an interview with Harrower when The Watch Tower was republished as a TextClassic in 2012, the Sydney Morning Herald described the novel as a "thriller", and Felix as "unhappy, meanspirited" and "one of the most superbly drawn evil characters in Australian literature" (Alcorn). The epithet "evil", whilst no doubt applicable to Felix, perpetuates the understanding of the figure as a caricature, a fairytale villain.' (Author's abstract)