School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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Item'There is a concept behind it': symbolic narrative and material realities in Randolph Stow's To the Islands( 2016)This thesis critically examines the novel To the Islands, published in 1958 by Australian writer Randolph Stow. Taking issue with the predominantly aestheticist readings of the novel that have dominated the field, I offer a close-reading which re-contextualises To the Islands in relation to Stow’s time at Forrest River Mission in 1957. Employing a methodology that refigures Stow’s anthropological and culturally appropriative modes in pursuit of his symbolic narrative, I argue that this is a novel intensely implicated in place. In doing so, I expose the authorial ambiguities and textual repressions in the novel that are directly linked to the material realities of Forrest River, both as Balanggarra country and as Mission site, to reveal the uneasy cultural and racial politics of this work. Out of this reading, To the Islands emerges as a far more problematic novel than most critics to date would have us believe. As a timely consideration of an author currently experiencing revived interest, this thesis makes a significant contribution to the field. It also has important implications for how we read texts which appropriate Aboriginal contexts.
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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.