School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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Item‘Something we can only desire’: writing the past in recent Australian literature & an extract from the novel 'To name those lost'( 2014)In the last decade, the novel in Australia has come under increasing scrutiny from historians, academics, and the wider public as novelists offer a vision of our past that often sits uneasily beside more formal historiographic investigations. There is a general expectation that fiction should be truthful with the past. Fiction, however, often undermines the empiricist view of referentiality that history promotes, instead exploiting the paradoxical break from the referent that the imagined topography of fiction allows. This leads to what Ellison has called ‘referential anxiety’, or an uncomfortable awarness of the loss of reciprocity with the world. Given this range of responses and the paradox of which they are indicative, to claim that the novel is a form of historiography misunderstands the nature of truth in fiction. This dissertation focuses on three Australian novels that exemplify the problematics of reference, Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance, Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, and J.M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year. The dissertation is paired with an extract from the novel To Name Those Lost, the story of an itinerant labourer and Black War veteran named Thomas Toosey. His journey takes him along the Launceston-Deloraine railway line during the early years of its operation as he searches for his son, William. Arriving in Launceston, Toosey finds the town in chaos. Riots break out in protest at a tax levied on citizens to pay for the rescue of shareholders in the bankrupt Launceston and Western Railway Company. Toosey is desperate to find his son who is somewhere in town amid the looting and general destruction, but at every turn he is confronted by the Irish transportee Fitheal Flynn and his companion, the hooded man, to whom Toosey owes a debt that he must repay.
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ItemThe roving party: extinction discourse in the literature of Tasmania( 2009)The nineteenth century discourse of extinction – a consensus of thought primarily based upon the assumption that ‘savage’ races would be displaced by the arrival of European civilisation – provided the intellectual foundation for policies which resulted in Aboriginal dispossession, internment, and death in Tasmania. For a long time, the Aboriginal Tasmanians were thought to have been annihilated. However, this claim is now understood to be fanciful. Aboriginality is no longer defined as a racial category but rather as an identity that has its basis in community. Nevertheless, extinction discourse continues to shape the features of modern literature about Tasmania. The first chapter of this dissertation will examine how extinction discourse was imagined in the nineteenth century and will trace the parallels that contemporary fiction about contact history shares with it. The novels examined include Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World by Mudrooroo, The Savage Crows by Robert Drewe, Manganinnie by Beth Roberts, and Wanting by Richard Flanagan. The extinctionist elements in these novels include a tendency to euglogise about the ‘lost race’ and a reliance on the trope of the last man or woman. The second chapter of the dissertation will examine novels that attempt to construct a representation of Aboriginality without reference to extinction. These texts subvert and ironise extinction discourse as a way of breaking the discursive continuities with colonialism and establishing a more nuanced view of Aboriginal identity in a post-colonial context. Novels analysed here include Drift by Brian Castro, Elysium by Robert Edric, and English Passengers by Matthew Kneale. However, in attempting to arrive at new understandings about Aboriginality, non-Aboriginal authors are hindered by the epistemological difficulties of knowing and representing the Other. In particular, they seem unable to extricate themselves from the binaries of colonialism.