School of Culture and Communication - Theses
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ItemLights and shadows in Australian historical fiction: how does historical fiction deal with how Australia comes to know its past?( 2019)This thesis examines how recent Australian historical fiction, particularly that of Kim Scott and Kate Grenville, re-imagines and reframes Australia’s past and how it offers new ways of relating to that past. It does so with an emphasis on the perceived disconnect between what is available to archive-based academic historiography and the current understanding of the historical issues most relevant to modern Australians. It is presented in three sections. The first section focuses particularly on how fiction writers address the historical archives, with examples drawn mainly from works about the early frontier between Indigenous and settler Australians. It examines how different fiction styles and techniques address the construction of history, particularly the contrast between traditional realist narrative fiction and more postmodern techniques, with reference to parallel movements in the writing of non-fiction history. It asks how the concept of the “truth” about the past is dealt with differently in historical fiction, compared to historiography. This section concludes that historical fiction, particularly fiction that uses less traditional forms offers culturally useful ways of addressing modern questions about the past, and relationships with the past. The second section of the thesis is an extended examination of the process of creating a work of research fiction based on historical material. It begins with a short historical account of the subject of the author’s research, and goes on to offer a detailed examination of the research process. It considers in more depth the issue of archival research as it relates to the creation of stories in the past. The original research for this thesis was carried out both online and in physical archives, and the second section discusses how the archival research process influenced the fictional work in terms of both form and content. The second section also discusses how the works and techniques examined in the first section influenced the creation of the research fiction, with additional discussion of the genre of fictional historical biography. The final part of the thesis is a creative work in the form of an extended extract from a historical novel, based on the life of the 19th century historical figure Edward Oxford. The novel, titled Lights and Shadows of Melbourne Life, is a first-person narrative that incorporates both real and fictional archival material. It interrogates questions of memory, identity, colonial attitudes to migration to Australia, and through its inclusion of archives and “archives”, contrasted with the narrator’s commentary, deals with questions of archival reliability.
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ItemAfter the apology: the Australian gothic and reconciliation melancholia( 2013)This thesis discusses three Australian Gothic texts: the novel Bereft (2010) by Chris Womersley, Rachel Ward’s film Beautiful Kate (2009) and Andrew Bovell’s play When the Rain Stops Falling (2009). It investigates how these texts deploy the features of the Australian Gothic across contemporary literary, cinematic and theatrical forms. This thesis argues that each text interrogates the ongoing role that settler guilt plays in contemporary Australia from a distinctively non-Aboriginal perspective. As a result, this work suggests that these case studies can be read as Gothic allegories for an emerging ‘post-reconciliation’ Australian culture. The final component of this project is a play entitled Doomsday Devices. The play uses many of the conventions of the Australian Gothic in a way that suggests a further discussion of ‘post-reconciliation’ identity as outlined in the critical section of this thesis. The play is a ghost story set in Melbourne in the summer of 2015.
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ItemWomen reading 1936: a creative writer’s reading of Return to Coolami, Jungfrau, and The Australian Women’s Weekly( 2012)This thesis focuses on three texts that were published in 1936: Dymphna Cusack’s novel Jungfrau, Eleanor Dark’s novel Return to Coolami, and that year’s fifty-two issues of The Australian Women’s Weekly. Cusack’s and Dark’s novels form part of today’s Australian feminist literary canon and are typically understood with the benefit of historical hindsight, especially in regards to their authors’ biographies. Furthermore, academics often turn back to these novels and writers in order to elaborate their own political and cultural agendas and theories. In this thesis, I argue that the original readers of these novels would never have read them in such ways and that such analyses, whilst fascinating and valuable, seldom discuss the problem of their own anachronism. In order to benefit my own and others’ reading and fiction writing practices, I wish to imagine what these novels meant to the audience for whom they were originally crafted. Influenced by New Historicism’s ‘anecdotal’ approach to history – where canonical literary texts are ‘defamiliarised’ through their juxtaposition against various contemporaneous, non-canonical texts – I use The Australian Women’s Weekly to create an original, evidence-based ‘window’ of insight into Australian life and culture in 1936. Within this context I speculate upon the ‘imaginative universes’ of Australian women in order to gain new insight into Dark’s and Cusack’s novels’ original meanings. In the first part of this thesis I discuss my methodology and analyse the novels’ original reception. In the second part of this thesis, I contemplate reading experiences from the past by reconstructing the ‘World of the Weekly in 1936’. Whilst I cannot claim to avoid anachronistic and subjective readings in this thesis, I have assiduously attempted to limit both by allowing the themes in the Weekly to lead my interpretations, by anchoring all of my interpretations in primary sources, and by exploring how my writerly movement between different rhetorical modes can expose and problematise the borders between the time-bound reader and the time-travelling text.
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ItemWitnessing Australian stories: history, testimony and memory in contemporary culture( 2010)This thesis identifies and examines a new form of public memory-work: witnessing. Since the late 1980s, witnessing has developed in response to the increased audibility of the voices of Australian Indigenous peoples and asylum seekers. Drawing upon theories of witnessing that understand the process as an exchange between a testifier and a ‘second person’, I perform a discourse analysis of the responses of settler Australians to the rise of marginal voices. Witnessing names both a set of cultural practices and a collective space of contestation over whose stories count as ‘Australian’. Analysing a range of popular texts - including literature, autobiography, history, film and television programmes - I demonstrate the omnipresence of witnessing within Australian public culture as a mode of nation building. Though linked to global phenomena, witnessing is informed by, and productive of, specifically national communities. From Kate Grenville's frontier novel The Secret River (2005), through to the surf documentary Bra Boys (2007), witnessing has come to mediate the way that people are heard in public, and how their histories and experiences are understood within cultural memory. Linked to discourses on national virtue and renewal, witnessing has emerged as a liberal cultural politics of recognition that works to re-constitute settler Australians as ‘good’ citizens. It positions Indigenous peoples and asylum seekers as ‘objects’ of feeling, and settler Australians as ‘gatekeepers’ of national history. Yet even with these limits, witnessing remains vital for a diverse range of groups and individuals in their efforts to secure recognition and reparation for injustice. Though derided under the Howard government as an ‘elite’ discourse, for a large minority of settler Australians witnessing has become central to understandings of ‘good’ citizenship. With the election of Rudd - and the declaration of two national apologies - witnessing has been thoroughly mainstreamed as the apotheosis of a ‘fair go’.