School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemUnsettlement: a new reading of Australian poetics( 2012)This is a thesis that takes the notion of ‘unsettlement’ in opposition to the settlement of English literature in Australia, and reads a number of remarkable colonial texts in this light. This is not a review of texts critical of settlement, such as may be found in Henry Lawson and others, though I do examine texts by canonical writers such as Charles Harpur and Dorothea Mackellar. I take Philip Mead’s argument for a contemporary unsettlement of Australian literature as my starting point: in order to demonstrate the historical beginnings and resources of such unsettlement. Settlement literature is embodied in national anthologies – and more than one of my case study texts comes from such anthologies. Many of the texts derive from the life-writing genres of letters and diaries; I also consider a poem, a note, songs, a game, drawings, letters inscribed on clubs, and messages left on trees and water tanks. The texts are written by Indigenous, Chinese, and Anglo-Celtic Australians; their writers practise a range of literacies. The very broadening of the terms of literature that allows the inclusion of texts such as Ned Kelly’s The Jerilderie Letter and Bennelong’s ‘Letter to Mr Philips’, means a shift in focus to historical significance: I focus on the nature of the poetics of these texts. My emphasis is therefore on the constitution of individual texts as such: their grammar, punctuation, visuality and materiality. The key concept I employ is borrowed from French theorists Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari – that of assemblage — and I ask how these unusual assemblages work to disassemble settlement. In reading the punctuation, I also adapt Roland Barthes’s theory of the punctum. Other key terms are deployed as necessary on a case-by-case basis (such as the neobaroque, in the final chapter). The chapters are structured thematically, through a range of tropes that are theorised in relation to settlement. These are: the hunt, the plough, invention, secrets, boredom, the field, settlement itself, and homelessness. In each chapter I read one or two of the select texts (except for the last, in which I look at several) in terms of the chapter’s theme. This thesis offers a ‘new reading of colonial poetics’: many of the texts have never previously been considered in terms of their specifically aesthetic features. I establish connections between canonical writers and those who are not usually considered writers at all. In focusing on the materiality of texts, within a context of poetics, this thesis attempts to open up the field of colonial poetry, and introduce new aesthetic possibilities.
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ItemGhosts of Ned Kelly: Peter Carey's True History and the myths that haunt us( 2011)Ned Kelly has been an emblem of Australian national identity for over 130 years. This thesis examines Peter Carey’s reimagination of the Kelly myth in True History of the Kelly Gang (2000). It considers our continued investment in Ned Kelly and what our interpretations of him reveal about Australian identity. The paper explores how Carey’s departure from the traditional Kelly reveals the underlying anxieties about Australianness and masculinity that existed at the time of the novel’s publication, a time during which Australia was reassessing its colonial history. The first chapter of the paper examines True History’s complication of cultural memory. It argues that by problematising Kelly’s Irish cultural memory, our own cultural memory of Kelly is similarly challenged. The second chapter examines Carey’s construction of Kelly’s Irishness more deeply. It argues that Carey’s Kelly is not the emblem of politicised Irishness based on resistance to imperial Britain common to Kelly narratives. Instead, he is less politically aware and also claims a transnational identity. The third chapter explores how Carey’s Kelly diverges from key aspects of the Australian heroic ideal he is used to represent: hetero-masculinity, mateship and heroic failure. Carey’s most striking divergence comes from his unsettling of gender and sexual codes. The paper argues that Australians continue to invest in Kelly because he provides an opportunity to stabilise an identity threatened by changing perspectives on history; in Kelly, we see the changing shape of our ideal selves.