24
Nation, literature, location
philip mead
Until recently ‘Australian literature’ has been an imagined entity that belonged predominantly
to the discourse of national culture and its institutions. The historiography
of this institution, with its constant revisions and contradictions, is complex.1
But by
far and away the strongest influence on its formation was the rage for nation that
Europeans in Australia brought with them from the beginning. This will to nation,
driven more than anything by an unassuageable hunger for identity in possession of the
land, was political, social, psychological and mythic. It was also divided between an anxious
sense of being displaced and inferior, and a confidence in being independent and
distinctive. It imposed a precise and exclusive alignment of unitary ethnicity, national
territory and literary tradition. Federation, as a political contract between regions with
vast geographical differences, and with different histories of discovery and settlement,
nevertheless imposed a continental sovereignty with determinate effects on the cultural
field. The idea of an Australian ‘civilisation’ was understood as essentially bound to the
establishment and legitimisation of a unisonant nation.
Thus the prefiguring of this nation-centred literature was read back into the intricacies
of colonial writing. The flickers of its nativeness were discerned here and there
for example, in William Charles Wentworth’s dream-vision of an Australian civilisation
in his long poem of 1822, Australasia; in Charles Harpur’s topographic romanticism;
in Catherine Helen Spence’s ‘unmistakeably (but not obtrusively) Australian novel’
(Clara Morison, 1854); and in Marcus Clarke’s assertions, in his preface to Adam Lindsay
Gordon’s Sea Spray and Smoke Drift (1867), about the self-interpreting Australian bush
and the beginnings of a national school of Australian poetry.2
Its late-19th-century
heroic age was represented as a legendary contribution to nation-founding. It accompanied
and inflected the invention of Australian modernity, in an uneasy ascendancy of
the metropolis over the bush. Its role, in the middle of the 20th century, was primarily
1 A useful introduction to the earlier version of Australian literary history is provided in G. A. Wilkes, The
Stockyard and the Croquet Lawn: Literary Evidence for Australia’s Cultural Development, Edward Arnold, 1981, and
Laurie Hergenhan, ed., The Penguin New Literary History of Australia, Penguin, 1988. For more recent accounts
of the strains and tensions in Australian literary history, see Bob Hodge and Vijay Mishra, Dark Side of the
Dream: Australian Literature and the Postcolonial Mind, A&U, 1991, pp. 1–22, and the articles in ‘New Directions
in Australian Literary Studies?’, Australian Literary Studies, 19.2 (Oct. 1999), pp. 131–62.
2 Brian Elliott, The Landscape of Australian Poetry, F. W. Cheshire, 1967, p. 75; Frederick Sinnett, The Fiction Fields
of Australia [1856], ed. Cecil Hadgraft, UQP, 1966, p. 36.
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the provision of a nationally differentiated universalism. Its (postmodern) fate has been
marginalisation, superseded as a canonical index of national identity by cinema and
popular culture. No doubt, a discourse of ‘nation’ will always be with us, as a defining
substrate of social and subjective life, and the narrative of Australian literature has had
an important role in that discourse and continues to do so in various educational contexts.
But it is now apparent just how unsettled it is in itself and how inadequate it is
for understanding individual literary texts, the rise of genres and the socio-economic
history of literary production, or even the value of literature generally.
The shift in thinking about literature in Australia, in recent decades, away from an
overriding and limiting concept of nation has coincided with a broader change in
Australian cultural life. The years since the 1970s have seen an extensive, if unresolved
and contradictory, sense within Australian society and culture that a revised account
of nationhood needed to be drafted. This has not meant tearing up the first draft of
Australia that was begun with white settlement, but rather updating and extending the
pre-existing historical and political terms of that settlement, re-examining the historical
archive out of which it was produced, and recognising that previously marginalised or
excluded peoples have contributions to make to the process of redefining the nation.
In the instance of Indigenous writers this contribution has been profound. Kim Scott,
for example, has argued for a fundamental reconceptualisation of the literary narrative
of nation:
Some might place Australian Indigenous writing within the realm of Australian Literature,
but there is a wider context; that of the emergence of Australia, as a nation, at the
same time as some of the stories which have grown from our land continued or were
adapted, or died forever. Australian literature, in such a context is a sickly stream.3
Of course this rewriting of a now problematised Australia has been politically contentious
at every level, with cultural impacts and existential anxieties for everyone.
This has been most obvious in the backlash at the social movement that led to the
High Court’s Mabo and Wik Peoples decisions (1992, 1996); in the political and moral
challenges of the Bringing Them Home report about the Stolen Generations (1997);
in the fate of multiculturalism and the idea of citizenship; in responses to the crisis
in Australian environmental history; in the debate about an Australian republic; and in
the bitter tussle over national borders and how permeable (or not) they should be in
relation to South-East Asia, Australia’s global region.
‘Nation’ remains a fundamental constitution of modern human society and culture.
It includes individual histories of ‘endeavours, sacrifice, and devotion’ as well as
problematic inheritances.4
For any nation, the political and cultural question, in the
present, is how to deal with these inheritances. And it is not as though nations are
3 Kim Scott, ‘Foreword’, in Anita M. Heiss, Dhuuluu-Yala: To Talk Straight: Publishing Indigenous Literature,
Aboriginal Studies Press, 2003, p. i.
4 Ernest Renan, ‘What is a Nation?’, in Homi K. Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration, Routledge, 1990, p. 19.
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Nation, literature, location
free to struggle with their memories and with the ideal of consensus in the present in
isolation. What a nation means – historically, culturally, symbolically – is everywhere
under pressure, from internal contests over narratives of nation, as much as from the
socio-economic imperatives of globalisation and evolving forms of state power. How
we experience and are able to imagine the national in a postmodern world is undergoing
radical reorganisation. The activist slogan ‘think global, act local’, for example,
with its deliberate occlusion of the national, is a current expression of impatience
with an order of human society that has often been violently maintained, historically
short-sighted, racially exclusive and ecocidal. But if Ernest Renan is right, a
nation is also a people’s ‘soul, a spiritual principle’.5
This deep dichotomy is one of
the reasons for our ambivalence about nationhood and how it is to be remade in the
present. Any historical ground or contemporary reference it provides is unresolved and
contradictory.
One effect of these shifts is that thinking about literature and nation is no longer
in thrall to exclusive, limited templates of genre, geography, identity and temporality.
Since the 1990s, as Robert Dixon has pointed out, previously residual comparative,
transnational and interdisciplinary impulses in Australian literary studies have surfaced
from beneath the ‘rhetoric of nationalism and disciplinary specialisation’.6
We can
now hear more clearly questions that were incipient, but muted, in the institutional
conversation about literature in Australia. How is literature located? How do we read
the history of ‘a literature’ once it is uncoupled from the drivers of national identity?
How do different genres valorise the same locales (the city of detective fiction
vis-`a-vis the city of the poetic imagination)? What role does the literary imagination
play in bioregional definition? Generally speaking, post-national Australian literary
studies have been moving in two directions: towards transcultural comparisons and
contexts, and towards rereadings of the local. These different spatial turns may appear
antithetical – global or transnational versus regional or local – but in critical practice
they are complementary. Much work in contemporary literary studies is an attempt to
understand and articulate the complexities of the imaginary places, locales, districts and
regions of literary texts and their recursive relations to the multi-faceted experience of
actual, lived places.
This chapter focuses on the role played by place-consciousness in this constantly
changing matrix of literature, nation and place. My argument is that the remarkable
florescence of regionally focused literary cultures in recent decades is not an unmotivated
or ephemeral phenomenon. And what we might refer to as a critical regionalism is
developing as an interactive response to this new regionalism and to the possibilities of
contemporary knowledge, particularly in the sphere of language and literature. Critical
5 Ibid.
6 Robert Dixon, ‘Boundary Work: Australian Literary Studies in the Field of Knowledge Production’, in David
Carter and Martin Crotty (eds), Australian Studies Centre 25th Anniversary Collection, University of Queensland,
2005, p. 33.
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regionalism draws to the centre of critical attention the specific, the singular, the
(imagined and historical) places of literary texts and locational perspectives on authors,
oeuvres and reception.7
As such, it is part of a cultural trajectory driven by the desire
to understand the singularities of literary texts and their production, including their
role in the multi-levelled experience of place and its representations. In this context,
knowledge about literary texts looks very different from what it did within the older
nationalist paradigm
One aspect of place consciousness – landscape representation – has always been a focus
of critical readings of national literature. Indeed, Australia is typical in this regard, even
if the fixation on landscape meanings as ‘the inscape of national identity’ has its individual
forms.8
European-imagined Australia, for example, has a long prehistory in the
operations of European vision in the South Pacific.9
This prehistory includes heterodox
elements of what Murray Bail has called European austromancy – thought experiments
in social theory that repeatedly imagined utopias and dystopias, like Jonathan Swift’s
Lilliput and Blefuscu, in what became Australian colonial space.10
The task of much
20th-century national historiography, as well as literary history, was to assimilate these
grand narratives of northern-hemisphere discovery and imperialism – their maritime
heroism, iconic representations of man and nature, as well as their eccentric social
imaginings – to the less grand one of penal settlement and colonisation. The Landscape
of Australian Poetry (1967) by the South Australian literary critic and historian Brian
Elliott exemplifies this tradition in the literary-critical field. Elliott’s study is concerned
with how the actual topography of Australia ‘appeared at first to impose obstacles to
poetic expression in Australia, then to liberate it; and finally, as the colonial period came
to its close, to choke and inhibit it’.11
The theme of the mid-20th-century focus of
his history is on the ‘emancipation . . . from the shackles of the colonial topographical
obsession and a return to the free vision of nature, a natural revaluation of the environmental
image’.12
In this connection, D. H. Lawrence’s descriptions in Kangaroo (1923)
of the writer Richard Somers’ experience of the Australian bush – ‘the landscape is so
unimpressive . . . aboriginal, out of our ken’ – have been a repeatedly contentious site
of debate about the rhetoric and politics of settler nativism in the history of Australian
‘landscape’.13
7 I borrow this term from Gayatri Spivak who uses it to describe her activist academic work in a more purely
political context of North–South differences but who nevertheless understands there is no ‘clear-cut distinction
between self-determination and nationalism, [between] regionalism and nationalism’: Judith Butler and Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State?: Language, Politics, Belonging, Seagull, 2007, p. 108.
8 Homi Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation’, in Bhabha (ed.), Nation and Narration, Routledge, 1990, p. 295.
9 See Bernard Smith, European Vision in the South Pacific, OUP, 1960. See also, for example, Ross Gibson’s
reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s story, ‘A MS. Found in a Bottle’, in South of the West: Postcolonialism and the
Narrative Construction of Australia, Indiana UP, 1992, ch. 5, pp. 93–110, for a perspicacious analysis of Australia
in the northern hemisphere literary imagination.
10 See Murray Bail, ‘Imagining Australia.’ Times Literary Supplement, 4,417 (27 Nov.–3 Dec. 1987), p. 1330.
11 Elliott, Landscape of Australian Poetry, p. xi.
12 Ibid., pp. xi–xii.
13 D. H. Lawrence, Kangaroo, Penguin, 1986, p. 87.
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Nation, literature, location
The obsession with landscape was inflected in numerous literary tropes: one of the
best-known is the literary and cultural dichotomy of Sydney or the Bush. It has a
complex archaeology in the ‘secular failure [and] spiritual triumph’ of the literature
of land exploration – Thomas Mitchell’s and Charles Sturt’s journals for example. We
can see the conflicting cultural expressions at work in the attempt to define the nature
of Australian belonging in the exchange between A. B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson and Henry
Lawson in the Bulletin in 1892, ‘allegro and pensoroso of the bush ballad school’.14
Earlier,
in ‘Clancy of the Overflow,’ Paterson’s vision had been of a romantically independent
Clancy, riding somewhere on the ‘sunlit plains extended’ of outback Queensland. To
Lawson this legend of the bush was a fantasy, city-bred, colonisingly Arcadian, and
probably class-bound.15
For him the bush was in reality a place of isolation, economic
hardship and downtrodden drovers’ wives. In Barbara Baynton’s short story ‘The Chosen
Vessel’ it was even worse. This topos has been revisited by numerous writers, in serious
and comic registers. It includes contemporary rewritings like Murray Bail’s story ‘The
Drover’s Wife’ (Contemporary Portraits, 1975); the stories about camping and bushwalking
in Frank Moorhouse’s Forty-Seventeen (1988); the debate between Les Murray
and Peter Porter in the 1970s about Athenian (city) and Boeotian (agrarian) traditions
in Western and Australian poetry; in John Kinsella’s poetics of a radical pastoral. It even
extends to instances of grunge fiction like Andrew McGahan’s Praise (1992), which
might otherwise be thought of as exclusively urban in their concerns and location.16
Even popular genres, like crime fiction, can be inflected by the dichotomy: Arthur
Upfield’s Napoleon Bonaparte is an outback detective.
Elsewhere in the same archaeology Australians are taught to read the lopsided, doubled
outline of their country’s ‘origins’: the map of Cook’s mythic voyage of 1770 is overlaid
with the settlement of Phillip’s drear purgatory of 1788, both of them east-coast events.
This faulty registration of history and place is reproduced in later maps of Australia.
Matthew Flinders’ circumnavigation of Van Diemen’s Land in 1798–9 and then of the
mainland in 1802 established the geographical entity of the continent and its lasting
name. It also completed the more than 150-year insularisation of Tasmania (in 1642
Abel Tasman had no reason to think his newly discovered Van Diemen’s Land was an
island). The cartography of the nation, on the other hand, has multiple iterations and
is not finalised until the first day of 1901. Its mostly cadastral state boundaries – apart
from the Queensland–New South Wales border from Mungindi to the coast, along the
Macintyre River, and the Murray – produce a geodetic palimpsest of white exploration
14 Gibson, South of the West, p. 89; Elliott, Landscape of Australian Poetry, p. 157.
15 See Coral Lansbury, Arcady in Australia: the Evocation of Australia in Nineteenth-Century English Literature, MUP,
1970, for a reading of the origin of an Arcadian Australia in mid-Victorian English literature.
16 The Porter–Murray debate includes Porter’s poem ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Hesiod’; Murray’s
response to it in an essay of 1978, ‘On Sitting Back and Thinking about Porter’s Boeotia’; and Porter’s reply,
‘Country Poetry and Town Poetry: A Debate with Les Murray’, Australian Literary Studies, 9.1 (May 1979),
pp. 39–48. For other details of this debate see Bruce Bennett, Spirit in Exile: Peter Porter and His Poetry, OUP,
1991, p. 146. For John Kinsella, in a reformulation of the Lawson–Paterson exchange, ‘Pastoral is the contrary
of sublime’: Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism, Manchester UP, p. 15.
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and settlement.17
Sovereignty requires maps. Tasmania is the exception again: the only
solely geopolitical sub-national region. But overwhelmingly the ‘natural’ entity of the
continent provided a powerful legitimating form for the political and social entity of
the Commonwealth of Australia, coordinating the desired convergence of environment,
nation and identity.18
Regionalism, both creative and critical, is a process of resisting
and critiquing this convergence.
The drawing and redrawing of the spatial parameters of Australia is analogous to the
intervals of its temporal existence. As the historian Graeme Davison has demonstrated,
using Eleanor Dark’s work of popular fiction The Timeless Land (1941) as a reference,
European settlers figured Aboriginal Australia as timeless.19
Time, and therefore history,
only arrive with European maritime discovery and white settlement. Likewise, before
Flinders, Australia was only partially named and incompletely mapped. In this sense it
was also a place-less land to the European mind because it was without their geopolitical
definition. One of the first responses of Europeans to Australia, a heritage everywhere
thematised in the literature of contact and settlement, is of a place-less, time-less, and
people-less land. The poem by Australie, or Emily Manning, ‘From the Clyde to
Braidwood’ (1877) is typical of this view of Australia as ‘bare, bald, prosaic’. In one
of the earliest published poems in Australia, ‘The Kangaroo’ (1819), Barron Field had
used the same word, prosaic, to describe ahistorical, acultural proto-Australian space.
As Paul Carter has demonstrated, it is not as though the Europeans arrived without
ideas and desires about what they were determined Australia, as a place, was to be.
The recent discovery of ‘deep time’ in Australian human history, Tom Griffiths argues,
has linked Australia to world history in new ways. These revise European versions
of it as the ‘Last sea-thing dredged by sailor Time from Space’, the South as other,
upside-down, or monstrous, thus indigenising Australian history and ‘localising’ the
Australian story.20
The evolution of a similarly new Australian spatial consciousness in
recent decades, profoundly influenced by Aboriginal being, has allowed Australians to
relocalise their understanding of literary production and its representations of place in
new ways.
17 This national chart of Australia has not been without residual dreams of secession and new states, including
the New England seventh state movement, led by Sir Earle Page in the 1920s and 30s, and more vaguely,
the push for a North Queensland separate state. A New State Convention was held in October 1923, in
Rockhampton. The most spectacular attempt at secession was a petition from Western Australia that went to
a Joint Committee of the British House of Lords and House of Commons in 1935. The boundaries of the
Australian Capital Territory, within New South Wales, were not finalised until 1911.
18 See J. M. Powell, A Continent for a Nation? Environment–Identity Convergences in Australia, 1901–2001 (2000);
Libby Robin, How a Continent Created a Nation (2007); and Gibson, South of the West, for a reading of the
‘duplicitous object of the South Land’, p. x.
19 Graeme Davison, The Unforgiving Minute: How Australia Learned to Tell the Time (1993), pp. 7–8. For an
important geographical reading of this history see J. M. Powell, Australian Space, Australian Time: Geographical
Perspectives (1975).
20 Bernard O’Dowd, ‘Australia’, in The Poems of Bernard O’Dowd, Lothian, 1944, p. 35; Tom Griffiths, ‘Travelling
in Deep Time: La Longue Dur´ee in Australian History’, Australian Humanities Review (June 2000), p. 4. A. D.
Hope’s poem ‘Australia’ (1939) also explores the (European and settler) paradoxes of the geological age of
the Australian continent and its youthfulness as a nation, although without any recognition of its Aboriginal
history.
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Nation, literature, location
This spatial consciousness is expressed across an impressively varied discourse of
spatiality, and it now works as one of the most influential developments in Australian
intellectual life. This body of work includes Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology
(1985), edited by Stephen Muecke, Krim Benterrak and Paddy Roe; Kay Schaffer’s
Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition, (1988); the collection
of essays, Island in the Stream: Myths of Place in Australian Culture (ed. Paul Foss,
1988); Ross Gibson’s first literary-contextual study The Diminishing Paradise: Changing
Literary Perceptions of Australia (1984) and his later Seven Versions of an Australian
Badland (2002), a brilliant fictocritical and post-colonial study of the Capricorn coast
of Central Queensland and its aftermath of story, ecology and history. Paul Carter’s
The Road to Botany Bay (1988) and Living in a New Country (1992), although primarily
concerned with setting out his original intellectual project of a ‘spatial’ (or
non-imperial) history, have numerous reference points in literary texts, from Mary
Fullerton’s poetry, to Dante, Defoe and David Malouf and, in their response to nonWestern
conceptions of space, move towards his poetics of the locational in The Lie of the
Land (1996).
The work of Meaghan Morris, Val Plumwood, Stephen Muecke, Deborah Bird
Rose and Tim Bonyhady across a range of inter-disciplinary sites – cultural studies,
ecofeminism, ethnography, art history – has revised the reference system of Australian
place-consciousness. Terms like region and state, with their etymologically embedded
dyads – metropole and nation – seem increasingly outmoded. The emphasis in the
title of Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths’ Words for Country: Landscape and Language in
Australia, for example, is away from landscape, a word ‘freighted with cultural meaning
which suggests a view that is remote and painterly,’ and towards the indigenising term
country.21
Country is a word currently invested with very different cultural and crosscultural
meanings. While it defines specific places of Indigenous habitation and of
Indigenous-settler histories, it is also a kinship term, implying familial and personal
responsibilities and a differently conceptualised sense of ownership. ‘Country is a living
entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness, and a will toward
life.’22
This kind of conceptual and linguistic shift is analysed in J. M. Arthur’s lexical
mapping of Australian settlement in her under-recognised study, The Default Country:
A Lexical Cartography of Twentieth-Century Australia (2003).23
Crucially, this discourse
of country also includes the critiques and contributions of Aboriginal intellectuals and
writers such as Kim Scott, Marcia Langton, Jeanie Bell, Anita Heiss, and Fabienne
Bayet-Charlton.24
21 Tim Bonyhady and Tom Griffiths, ‘Landscape and Language’, in Bonyhady and Griffiths (eds), Words for
Country: Landscape and Language in Australia, UNSWP, 2002, p. 1.
22 Deborah Bird Rose, Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness, Australian
Heritage Commission, 1996, p. 7.
23 See also her chapter, ‘Natural Beauty, Man-Made’ in Bonyhady and Griffiths, eds, Words for Country, pp.
190–205.
24 See, for example, Michele Grossman (ed.), Blacklines: Contemporary Critical Writing by Indigenous Australians,
MUP, 2003.
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This heterogeneous and multi-disciplinary discourse of place-consciousness frequently
draws on and critiques literary representations of place and region to provide
the stimulus for a new regional- and location-focused literary history and critical reading.
The groundwork for this reading was bibliographical, anthological and scholarly,
but critics interested in the broader significance of Australian literary works have begun
to build on this foundational work and to explore methodologically innovative and
differently thematic possibilities for critical regionalism, emphasising the singularities
and specificities of representations and imaginings of space and place. If the predominance
of landscape in the Australian literary and critical tradition was the equivalent of a
simple conic projection of space onto the flat page, our understanding of the history of
spatial consciousness has evolved. We are now able to read the literary history of vastly
differentiated Australian place, region and locale for its representation of how space
is produced by acts of performative language, sustained by memory, sung into being,
apprehended in the act of being travelled across, returned to, multiply imagined, interconnected
to experiences of the global world – as well as being defaced and degraded
by loss of language and story.
The west
It is no surprise, perhaps, that Western Australia – given its vast size, geographical and
historical difference from Eastern Australia, as well as its Indian Ocean orientation –
has been a leader in regional literary definition. ‘West coasts tend to be wild coasts,
final coasts to be settled, lonelier places for being last.’25
The distinctive growth of
Western Australian literature is reflected in anthologies like Soundings: a Selection of
Western Australian Poetry (ed. Veronica Brady, 1976); New Country: a Selection of Western
Australian Short Stories (ed. Bruce Bennett, also in 1976); Wide Domain: Western Australian
Themes and Images (ed. Bruce Bennett and William Grono, 1979). There is also the online
anthology Western Australian Writing by John Kinsella and Toby Burrows, as well as
bibliographical and critical studies such as that edited by Bennett, John Hay and Susan
Ashford, Western Australian Literature: a Bibliography (1981; revised 1990, as Western
Australian Writing: a Bibliography). Bennett’s edited volume, The Literature of Western
Australia (1979), is a collection of detailed critical studies of Western Australian diaries,
letters, journals, novels, short fiction, poetry, drama, children’s books, newspapers, and
literary journalism. Such scholarly and critical work ensures that Western Australia, in
any understanding of the ‘ways in which the land or local conditions may have shaped,
or been shaped by, the literary imagination’ is richly represented.26
25 Tim Winton, Land’s Edge, Macmillan, 1993, p. 103.
26 Bruce Bennett, The Literature of Western Australia, University of Western Australia, 1979, p. xiii. The stimulus
for regional literary history has often been celebratory and therefore ambivalent. Centenaries, sesquicentenaries
etc. of first settlement, prompt the desire for stocktakes of substantive cultural achievement, but they are also
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Nation, literature, location
This important critical work of Western Australian cultural localisation exists alongside
powerful narrative, mythic and poetic expressions of the west’s difference. Examples
are Randolph Stow’s reading of the Batavia disaster of 1629 as the story of an Indian
Ocean Anti-Christ, the mythic antithesis to the (Pacific) Southland; Kim Scott’s Benang,
from the Heart (1999) with its complex narrative tracks through Nyoongar country and
history; the Indian Ocean littoral of Robert Drewe and Tim Winton (The Bodysurfers,
1983; Land’s Edge, 1993); and Kinsella’s Avon Valley-centred poetics of spatial lyricism
and its localised critique of literary pastoralism and actual land management.27
Since
the 1970s, Westerly, the WA-based quarterly literary journal founded in 1956, has contributed
not only to the nurturing of Western Australian creative writing but also to
that writing’s South-East Asian orientations.
Small islands
Despite the historical depth of its literary heritage and the richness of its contemporary
writing culture, Tasmania has yet to develop a critical regionalism comparable
to that of the west or the north. There are single articles of cultural overview such
as Jim Davidson’s essay ‘Tasmanian Gothic’ (1989), Margaret Scott’s ‘Tasmania’s Literary
Heritage’ (1999), and the environmental historian Peter Hay’s collection of occasional
pieces, Vandiemonian Essays (2002) that explore Tasmanian culture more broadly
and personally.28
Anthologies of Tasmanian writing, like Effects of Light: the Poetry of
Tasmania (ed. Margaret Scott and Vivian Smith,1985) and Along these Lines: from Trowenna
to Tasmania: at least two centuries of peripatetic perspectives in poetry and prose (ed. C. A.
Cranston, 2000) have been prompted by the perceived importance and distinctiveness
of Tasmania as both geographically distinctive and equally fascinating as a place in the
literary imagination. But these offer only the briefest introductory and contextual notes
on the literary material they excerpt and anthologise.
As a place of the imagination, Tasmania has a presence in the literature of
islands and island identity, a fact recognised in a 2000 collection of critical essays in
reminders of the violence of colonial origins. See for example: Cecil Hadgraft, ‘this small commentary on
our literature’, in Queensland and its Writers (100 Years – 100 Authors), UQP, 1959, preface; the location of
Kenneth Slessor’s ‘Five Visions of Captain Cook’ as a North Queensland poem in F. W. Robinson, ‘The
Earliest Writings of Queensland’ in R. S. Byrnes and Val Vallis (eds), The Queensland Centenary Anthology,
Longman, 1959, pp. 3–6; Bruce Bennett, The Literature of Western Australia (1979) was one of the volumes in
Western Australia’s Sesquicentenary Celebration Series.
27 See Randolph Stow, ‘The Southland of Antichrist: the Batavia Disaster of 1629’ in Anna Rutherford (ed.),
Commonwealth: Papers Delivered at the Conference of Commonwealth Literature, Aarhus University, 26–30 Apr. 1971,
Akademisk Boghandel, 1971, pp. 160–7; and John Kinsella, Disclosed Poetics: Beyond Landscape and Lyricism,
and Contrary Rhetoric: Lectures on Landscape and Language, both ed. Glen Phillips and Andrew Taylor, Fremantle
Press, 2007, 2008. See also the suggestion of an ‘Indian Ocean’ Cultural Studies in Devleena Ghosh and
Stephen Muecke (eds), The UTS Review: Cultural Studies and New Writing, 6.2 (Nov. 2000), and in Stephen
Muecke, ‘Cultural Studies’ Networking Strategies in the South’, Australian Humanities Review, 44 (Mar. 2008).
28 See Jim Davidson, ‘Tasmanian Gothic’, Meanjin, 48.2 (1989), pp. 307–24; Margaret Scott, ‘Tasmania’s Literary
Heritage’, 40◦
South, 12 (Autumn 1999), pp. 19–22; and Peter Hay, Vandiemonian Essays, Walleah, 2002.
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cross-cultural island writing, Messages in a Bottle: The Literature of Small Islands.29
Although Island magazine (originally The Tasmanian Review) focuses on Tasmanian
writing and themes, further possibilities for critical regionalism in the literature of
Tasmania remain to be explored, not least Tasmania’s function in the literary imagination
as a mise-en-abˆyme for Australia, the island continent. From the northern hemisphere,
for example, Tasmanian literary insularity has recently been read as an allegory
of ‘tensions between the local and global’.30
The localised influence of Clarke’s His
Natural Life (1874), a melodrama of penal Van Diemen’s Land, usually thought of as
a monument of national literature, extends into the present with the debate about
the origins of gothic Tasmania: is it natural or cultural? distinctive or demeaning?
Chloe Hooper’s A Child’s Book of True Crime and Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book
of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish, both published in 2002 and both reinterpretations
of Van Diemen’s Land and its convict history, are two contending fictions in this
debate.
Tasmanian history seems to be a readily available archive of the colonial past but
subject to the contradictory functions of remembering and forgetting. Novelists such
as Drewe in The Savage Crows (1976) and Mudrooroo in Doctor Wooreddy’s Prescription
for Enduring the Ending of the World (1983) have been fascinated with the workings of
the settler unconscious as it surfaces in the journals of George Augustus Robinson,
with their first-hand account of frontier conflict in 1830s Van Diemen’s Land. Probably
because of its insularity, Tasmania also reflects the use that humans have put islands to as
social laboratories, in reality and in the imagination. The distinctive utopian/dystopian
structures and themes in the literature of Tasmania begin with Gulliver’s Travels (1726);
they include Louis Nowra’s play about the descendants of a lost tribe of ex-convicts and
gold-seekers, The Golden Age (1985); Christopher Koch’s east-coast faeryland in The
Doubleman (1985); Dennis Altman’s speculative novel of 1970s secession, The Comfort
of Men (1993); Brian Castro’s radically experimental novel of racial difference and
lament for Tasmanian Aboriginal history, Drift (1994); Flanagan’s magical-realist fiction
of hydromodernisation, The Sound of One Hand Clapping (1997); and Julia Leigh’s
biogenetic-gothic The Hunter (1999).31
A further sign of the complexity of Tasmania’s place in the literary imaginary of
both an archipelagic Australia and the southern hemisphere as a whole is evident in its
encompassing of the island chains of Bass Strait and its relations to the polar continent
29 See Fiona Polack, ‘Writing and Rewriting the Island: Tasmania, Politics, and Contemporary Australian
Fiction’, in Laurie Brinklow, Frank Ledwell and Jane Ledwell (eds), Message in a Bottle: The Literature of
Small Islands: Proceedings from an International Conference, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada, 28–30 June
1998, Institute of Island Studies, 2000, pp. 215–30. See also Tim Jetson, ‘Place’, in Alison Alexander (ed.),
The Companion to Tasmanian History, Centre for Tasmanian Historical Studies, University of Tasmania, 2005,
pp. 466–71.
30 Nicholas Birns and Rebecca McNeer, ‘Introduction’, in Birns and McNeer (eds), A Companion to Australian
Literature since 1900, Cambden House, 2007, p. 5.
31 See Tony Hughes D’Aeth, ‘Australian Writing, Deep Ecology and Julia Leigh’s The Hunter’, Journal of the
Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 1 (2002), pp. 19–31.
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Nation, literature, location
of Antarctica, both regions with their own histories of literary representation.32
In some
contemporary Aboriginal spatial representation of Australia, like David Mowaljarlai’s
‘Bandaiyan: the Body of Australia’, where Uluru is the navel of the country, Tasmania
has a new antipodean presence as the country’s feet.33
Central south
In recent decades a number of anthologies of South Australian writing and some
bibliographies of South Australian poetry have been published. Patterns of spatial representation
in South Australian writing are characterised by the capital Adelaide’s location,
on the coastal edge of one of the most arid regions of the continent, and extend to
the Centre, with its origins in the unique social experiment of the Wakefield Plan for
emigration and William Light’s city grid plan. Murray Bail’s novel Holden’s Performance
(1987), for example, draws on the city’s planning and social history in its portrayal of
Adelaide. South and central Australia have also been the sites of some of the most
important survivals of Aboriginal culture, including Indigenous languages and linguistic
art forms. The importance of these rich and ancient cultures of country-located
poetic, mythic and historical forms is only beginning to be understood in terms of a
post-national Australian culture. This context includes the important figure of David
Unaipon and the story of his Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines, a work he wrote
for publication by Angus & Robertson in 1926 and which was appropriated by William
Ramsay Smith and published under his name in 1930 (and subsequently reprinted until
1998). Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker, in their edition of his original Tales in
2001, have helped to repatriate Unaipon’s work, ‘weaving the text back home to the
community (or communities or family groups) where the stories were told and traded
in the first place’. Muecke and Shoemaker view their decolonising practice as editors,
as countering the ‘imperialism and universalism of writing that is supposed to transcend
place, aspire to the universal, and conquer time by becoming of permanent historical
significance’.34
In the 1940s Adelaide and South Australia were the hub of one of the most assertively
nationalist episodes in Australian culture and, again, one with problematic relations
to Aboriginal culture. Stimulated by P. R. Stephensen’s The Foundations of Culture
in Australia (1936) and led by South Australian writers Rex Ingamells, Ian Mudie,
Max Harris, the Jindyworobak movement was an attempt to Australianise writing and
32 See Stephen Murray-Smith and John Thompson (eds), Bass Strait Bibliography: A Guide to the Literature
on Bass Strait Covering Scientific and Non-scientific Material, Victorian Institute of Marine Sciences, 1981;
Stephen Murray-Smith, ‘Three Islands: A Case Study in Survival’, in Imelda Palmer (ed.), Melbourne
Studies in Education 1986, MUP, 1986, pp. 209–24, and the ‘Representations of Antarctica’ bibliography at
<http://www.utas.edu.au/english/Representations_of_Antarctica/>.
33 Bill Arthur and Frances Morphy (eds), Macquarie Atlas of Indigenous Australia: Culture and Society through Space
and Time, Macquarie Library, 2005, p. 24.
34 Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker, ‘Introduction’, in David Unaipon, Legendary Tales of the Australian
Aborigines, MUP, 2001, p. xliii.
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cultural traditions (see Chapter 10). Aspects of Aboriginal culture (mediated through
anthropological studies) were colonised in the cause of defining a white, decolonised
version of Australian culture. As its name, even, betrays – a word from James Devaney’s
The Vanished Tribes (1929) meaning to annex, or join – the neo-colonial and depoliticising
provenance of Jindyworobak is apparent. But as Brian Elliott’s 1979 anthology
of Jindyworobak writing demonstrates, it was also motivated by what has proved to
be a continuing desire in the white Australian imaginary, particularly in relation to
spatial representations, for a species of cultural–racial syncretism.35
In the context of
anthropological and linguistic research, Norman Tindale’s well-known ‘Map Showing
the Distribution of the Aboriginal Tribes of Australia’ of 1940 is analogous to the work
of the Jindyworobaks, remapping as it does the spatial and social complexities of the
continent-wide distribution of the Aboriginal nations.
Concurrent with these episodes of South Australian literary culture is the Hermannsburg
linguist and anthropologist T. G. H. Strehlow’s Songs of Central Australia
(1971), the contentious product of a lifetime’s work among the Arrernte (Aranda)
peoples. (Strehlow had influenced Ingamells’ conception of Jindyworobak by his essay
‘Conditional Culture,’ 1938.) Strehlow’s study, overlapping in complex ways with the
Jindyworobaks and with David Unaipon, is a monumental attempt to preserve and
translate the great heritage of sacred Aboriginal song and story, including its essential
and constitutive relation to, and celebration of, place. Strehlow’s final vision of ‘the
strong web of future Australian verse’ is that it will be woven with the ‘strands that
will be found to be poetic threads spun upon the Stone Age hair-spindles of Central
Australia’.36
This evolving (white) cultural dream, given different expressions in Strehlow and in
the Jindyworobaks, also appears translated into environmentalist terms in later essays of
Judith Wright’s under the heading of ‘About Conservation’ (in Because I Was Invited,
1975), in Les Murray’s essay ‘The Human-Hair Thread’, and in such poems of his as
‘The Bulahdelah–Taree Holiday Song Cycle’. As recently as 1977, over 40 years after
Ingamells’ first use of the term Jindyworobak, Murray was drawing on the contentiously
nationalist material of Jindyworobak for an updated concept of cultural interchange and
spirituality-in-place. Murray wrote:
my abiding interest is in integrations, in convergences. I want my poems to be more
than just National Parks of sentimental preservation, useful as the National Parks are
as holding operations in the modern age. What I am after is a spiritual change that
would make them unnecessary. . . . the Jindyworobak poets were on the right track, in
a way; their concept of environmental value, of the slow moulding of all people within
a continent or region towards the natural human form which that continent or region
demands, that is a real process.37
35 Brian Elliott (ed.), The Jindyworobaks, UQP, 1979.
36 T. G. H. Strehlow, Songs of Central Australia, A&R, 1971, p. 729.
37 Les Murray, ‘The Human-Hair Thread’, Persistence in Folly, Sirius, 1984, p. 27.
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Nation, literature, location
The north
The historian Regina Carter, in her study of early Asian–Australian contacts and
polyethnicity in North Australia, asserts that Australian history ‘properly begins’ in
the north. ‘Looking at Australian history from north to south,’ as she argues, ‘reconfigures
much of what we think we know of the Australian past.’38
This is exactly what
Cheryl Taylor, Elizabeth Perkins and David Headon have done in their critical accounts
of the writing of the Northern Territory and the tropical north. Headon’s North of the
Ten Commandments: A Collection of Northern Territory Literature (1991) is probably the
most eclectic selection of any Australian regional literature yet published. It acknowledges
those classics of Australian and Territorian writing, Mrs Aeneas Gunn’s We of the
Never-Never (1908) and Xavier Herbert’s Capricornia (1938) and Poor Fellow My Country
(1975). In addition, it includes translations of Aboriginal song cycles and dreaming stories;
Aboriginal retellings of white maritime exploration (Cook, Flinders); extracts from
journals of overland exploration (Stuart, Leichhardt, Giles, Campbell, Stokes); accounts
of violent white invasion like Ernestine Hill’s ‘The Daly River Murders of 1884 and
their Aftermath’ and ‘The Coniston “Massacres” of August 1928’ by Sidney Downer.
There are also many yarns, ballads and stories of frontier exploits and ‘incredibilities’;
and modern Aboriginal writing, including the Yirrkala Bark Petition of 1963 and Vincent
Lingiari’s speech in August 1975, at Wattie Creek, in Gurindji and English, at the
handing back of Aboriginal land. All of these represent the ‘paradox and contradiction,
idiosyncrasy and absurdity’ of the literature of the Northern Territory.39
In their analysis of the writing of what David Malouf has referred to as the ‘uncontrollable
North’, Taylor and Perkins make the point that no ‘form of [non-Indigenous]
writing has contributed more to the representation of North Queensland than long
prose narratives’, predominantly of the encounter with a tropical environment and the
long history of racial interaction and violence, including with the island and surrounding
regions to the north of the north (Papua, Papua New Guinea, Indonesia, Timor-
Leste).40
They detail the foundation of northern regional identity in these narratives of
explorers, colonisers, castaways, frontier policemen, female pioneers, amateur and spurious
ethnographers, white fringe-dwellers and exiles (E. J. Banfield, Jack McLaren), as
well as the mid- to late-20th-century critique and rewriting of this identity in the fiction
of Jean Devanny, Sarah Campion, Thea Astley, Eric Willmot and Janette Turner Hospital.
Chilla Bulbeck and Gillian Whitlock have both analysed the quirky and powerful
regionalism of Astley’s fiction: the ‘strangeness of north Queensland tropical vegetation,
time and space produce strange people, the “Queensland oddball” or “humanoids” ’.41
38 Regina Carter, Mixed Relations: Asian–Aboriginal Contact in North Australia, UWAP, 2006, p. 1.
39 David Headon (ed.), North of the Ten Commandments: A Collection of Northern Territory Literature, Hodder &
Stoughton, 1991, p. xvii.
40 Cheryl Taylor and Elizabeth Perkins, ‘Warm Words: North Queensland Writing’, in Patrick Buckridge and
Belinda McKay (eds), By the Book: A Literary History of Queensland, UQP, 2007, p. 214.
41 Chilla Bulbeck, ‘Regionalism’, in James Walter (ed.), Australian Studies: A Survey, OUP, 1989, p. 74.
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A brilliant recent rewriting and extension of this tradition, Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria
(2006) embodies an Indigenous perspective on this conflicted history of human
interaction and habitation. Wright’s re-presentation of the gulf region, including its
powerful white avatar in Herbert’s Capricornia, embraces both Aboriginal cosmogony,
including ancestor spirits’ creation of the topography – ‘the serpent’s covenant permeates
everything’ – savage satire of white economic imperialism (bauxite mining), and
allegories of the historico-spatial imagination.42
Cecil Hadgraft has a significant place in this overview. His Queensland and its Writers:
100 years, 100 authors (1959) was published within a year of his Australian Literature: A
Critical Account to 1955 (1960). The virtually simultaneous perspectives of these two
studies, one regional, one national, were prescient of future directions in Australian
literary studies. Building on half a century’s work in regional literary studies, including
Hadgraft’s, Patrick Buckridge and Belinda McKay published their edited collection of
essays, By the Book: A Literary History of Queensland, in 2007. So far, this is the most
highly developed example of regional literary history in Australia. It includes a history
of North Queensland writing by Cheryl Taylor and Elizabeth Perkins; and a version
of the preface to the Writers of Tropical Queensland subset of the AustLit database
and essays about ‘South-East’ (city, hinterland and Darling Downs), ‘Central,’ and
‘Western’ Queensland writing; as well as ‘Statewide Themes’ (Indigenous, children’s,
travel). Surveying the quantity and variety of Queensland literary heritage, Buckridge
and McKay begin with the question of whether a ‘Queensland difference’ is identifiable:
the idea of Queensland as not just a geopolitical subdivision of the nation but a ‘state
of mind’. Their response to this hypothesis is to ‘see if we could use the literary history
of Queensland not to boost and consolidate Queensland’s image of itself as a whole
and distinct entity but to scrutinise that image, to look beyond it, to question it, even
to ignore it if that seemed the right thing to do’. In this sense, their ‘consortium’ of
critical essays represents a reflective instance of critical regionalism that is informed by
an awareness of how a geopolitical region may not be a holistically literary one.43
The historical depth of their study rests on earlier work in critical regionalism,
including Hadgraft’s; J. J. Stable and A. E. M. Kirkwood’s A Book of Queensland Verse
(1924); H. A. Kellow’s critical study Queensland Poets (1930); and also the powerful
presence of Queensland writers and intellectuals in simultaneously regional and national
definition. Malouf’s fiction – especially Johnno (1975) and Harland’s Half Acre (1984) –
his memoir 12 Edmonstone Street (1985), and many of his short stories are meditations on
human relations to the specific places and space of Brisbane (in wartime, in the louche
1950s, in the 1960s makeover), South-East Queensland and the ‘North’.44
Malouf
has also contributed to the discourse of spatial consciousness, mentioned earlier, in his
42 Alexis Wright, Carpentaria, Giramondo, 2006, p. 11.
43 Buckridge and McKay, ‘Introduction’, in Buckridge and McKay (eds), By the Book, p. 5.
44 See William Hatherell, The Third Metropolis: Imagining Brisbane Through Art and Literature, 1940–1970, UQP,
2007, p. 1.
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Nation, literature, location
conversation with Paul Carter about writing and historical identity.45
But, as the readings
in By the Book demonstrate, there are many other distinctive facets to the representation
of place and space by Queensland writers. And the Queensland-inflected intellectual
tradition goes back, at least, to the Toowoomba-born A. G. Stephens and his role at
the Bulletin. It includes important institutions in Australian literary production like the
magazines Meanjin (originally), Barjai, LiNQ, the publishers Jacaranda Press, Makar
Press and University of Queensland Press, and the contributions to Australian literary
studies at the University of Queensland (Australian Literary Studies, Hecate) and James
Cook University. On any map of Australian literary intellectual life, Queensland would
have one of the most densely represented histories.
Other regions
Patrick Morgan’s work on the literature of Gippsland in Victoria – The Literature of
Gippsland:The Social and Historical Context of Early Writings, with Bibliography (1986) and
Shadow and Shine: An Anthology of Gippsland Literature (1988) – provides one of the
earliest scholarly and critical discernments of a literary region. Morgan’s identification
of the rich traditions of Gippsland writing was stimulated by the project of The Oxford
Literary Guide to Australia (1987; rev. 1993), for which he was an associate editor. This
guide to literary landscape features, while national in extent, is organised by state and
territory. It provides short literary histories of Australian ‘towns, townships, suburbs,
rivers, mountains, well-known geographical areas such as the Riverina, the Monaro and
the Mallee’, in terms of where writers have lived, worked and set their works.46
The
section ‘Australian Territories’ includes entries on Antarctica, the Australian Capital
Territory, Norfolk Island, and the Northern Territory.
Although ‘Canberra’ is an entry in the first edition of The Oxford Companion to
Australian Literature (1985) it was dropped from the revised, 1994, edition. This move
goes counter to the complex and unique literary culture of this region, which includes
the narrative history of pastoral settlement, lyric encounters with the Monaro (David
Campbell, Michael Dransfield), the political novel (Sarah Dowse, West Block, 1983) and
the Seven Writers literary collective (Canberra Tales, 1988).
New readings
A tangible response to the development of localised literary cultures is research in the
field of Australian literature that can now be conducted with sophisticated bibliographical
resources able to differentiate for region and locale. Searchable and mineable spatially
based subsets of the globally accessible AustLit database, like the Literature of Tasmania,
45 See Paul Carter and David Malouf, ‘Spatial History’, Textual Practice, 3 (1989), pp. 173–83.
46 Peter Pierce, ‘Introduction’, in Pierce (ed.), The Oxford Literary Guide to Australia, OUP, 1993, p. xi.
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Writers of Tropical Queensland, and Australian Literary Responses to Asia, provide data
about writers and their works with a special emphasis on regional or spatial terms.47
The possibilities of this kind of research into Australian literature and literary cultures
are only beginning to be explored.
An important influence here is Franco Moretti’s remodelling of literary history,
including spatial elements, in Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary Theory
(2005). Moretti’s insights are often informed by a ‘distant reading’ of fictional versions
of places (cities, villages, suburbs) and statistical analysis of book history and genres
(epistolary, gothic). In the European and British history of literary form proposed by
Moretti, the national is a contested and conflictual structure; it is subject to movements
of political and cultural devolution, as in Britain, and to the resurgence of ‘older,
smaller homeland’ grounds of cultural identity in Europe.48
Such cultural investments,
Moretti demonstrates, are reflected in the provincial, regional or village-life novel, for
example, and in poetic movements like the Scottish Renaissance of the 1920s and Hugh
MacDiarmid’s project of Lallans.49
What Australian literary culture might reveal, viewed
as a topography of forms and subjected to similar kinds of spatialised reading, remains to
be seen, but there is every possibility it would quantify, variously, the shift away from a
nation-centred literature to a location-centred one. For example, such empirical analysis
might compensate for what has been a blind spot in the nationalist paradigm about the
significance in Australian writing of representations of the town and the regional city.
A locational literary history would also provide a re-evaluation of iconic instances
of literary place-consciousness, sometimes located firmly within the older narrative
of national identity. Examples are Clarke’s Tasman Peninsula, Lawson’s small selections,
Mary Grant Bruce’s South Gippsland, Kenneth Slessor’s Sydney Harbour, David
Campbell’s Monaro, Malouf’s Brisbane, Judith Wright’s New England, Frank Hardy’s
Carringbush, Thea Astley’s tropical north, Drewe’s beaches, Kinsella’s wheatlands, Alex
Miller’s stone country. A critical regional reading of such places of the imagination
would return them to the strata of Indigenous and other localised histories of representation
as well as contemporary reorientations of spatial experience and knowledge.
For example, a reading of the Kimberley might move between the universe of
ancient and modern Indigenous narratives and songs (Worora, Ngarinyin, Wunambal)
with their structure of monsoonal seasonality; Dampier’s and Baudin’s narratives of
coastal contact; Daniel Defoe’s Adventures of Captain Singleton (1720), Sir George Grey’s
late-1830s journals of exploration; and contemporary Indigenous mythography (Joe
Nangan’s Dreaming, 1976; Kim Scott, True Country, 1993; Daisy Utemorrah et al., Visions
of Mowanjum, 1980). It could also encompass white imperialist fictions of a vanished
Lemurian civilisation (James Francis Hogan’s The Lost Explorer, 1890; G. Firth Scott’s
47 <http://www.austlit.edu.au>.
48 Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary Theory, Verso, 2005, pp. 51–2.
49 See Morag Shiach, ‘Nation, Region, Place: Devolving Cultures’, in Laura Marcus and Peter Nicholls (eds),
The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century English Literature, CUP, 2004, p. 533ff.
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Nation, literature, location
The Lost Lemuria, 1898) and H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Out of Time’ (1936),
part Indiana Jones pseudo-anthropological romance, part speculative fiction. Other
elements might be another narrative of civilisational cycles, Mary Durack’s family
memoir of failed pastoral settlement Kings in Grass Castles (1959); Randolph Stow’s To
the Islands (1958); Katharine Susannah Prichard’s Coonardoo (1929); Gail Jones’ Sorry
(2007); as well as contemporary autobiographical and non-fiction accounts of the cattle
and mining industries.50
An indigenised reading of this region would emphasise the
ways in which country has grown these rich strata of representations. Such a reading
might also reveal the conjunctions of the cultural expressions of lived experience of a
region, over thousands of years, and that same region’s possibility as a remote locale of
meaning and identity for writers who may never have experienced the actual place, like
Lovecraft.
The city as region
Although it necessarily works with the surviving archaeology and hierarchies of the
region/metropolis dyad – Sydney and/or the Bush – critical regionalism is theoretically
predicated on the assumption that all places are equally distinctive and meaningful in the
literary imagination. John Docker’s influential account of Sydney and Melbourne cultural
history in Australian Cultural Elites (1974) – Sydney aestheticism versus Melburnian
social commitment – predates the spatial turn in critical theory and is therefore almost
entirely despatialised.51
Rereadings of the city, though, as a region of the Australian
imaginary are returning literary texts to the specificities of their historical and spatial
contexts.
Since the growth of Australian spatial discourse, new readings of the city in the literary
imagination have tentatively emerged. Peter Kirkpatrick’s The Sea-Coast of Bohemia:
Literary Life in Sydney’s Roaring Twenties (1992; rev. 2007) reads Sydney culture of the
1920s in terms of the paradoxical maps of Bohemia, the originally European country
of romance, and virtual city-space of the artistic demi-monde.52
William Hatherell’s
The Third Metropolis: Imagining Brisbane Through Art and Literature, 1940–1970 (2007) is a
reading of post-1940 literary Brisbane, ‘part chronological, part thematic’, that focuses
on the paradox of a city that its writers characterised as a cultural desert (Thomas
Shapcott) but that at the same time produced a remarkable flourishing of literary and
artistic activity.53
These studies emphasise the spatial (inner urban) contexts of literary production as
well as the interconnectedness of writers to heterogenous creative communities and
50 The most detailed reading of Lemurian fiction is in John Docker, The Nervous Nineties: Australian Cultural Life
in the 1890s, OUP, 1991.
51 Hatherell, The Third Metropolis, p. 14.
52 Kirkpatrick’s critical study has a companion volume in Jill Dimond and Peter Kirkpatrick, Literary Sydney: A
Walking Guide, UQP, 2000.
53 Hatherell, The Third Metropolis, p. 3.
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those communities’ often contradictory relations to Australian social and economic
history. Members of a younger of generation of Indigenous writers, including Samuel
Wagan Watson, Tony Birch and Lisa Bellear, are also writing about contemporary
Indigenous perspectives on the Australian city – Dreaming in Urban Areas, as Lisa Bellear’s
1996 poetry collection expressed it. Radical Melbourne (2001) and Radical Melbourne 2:
The Enemy Within (2004) by Jeff Sparrow and Jill Sparrow, and Radical Brisbane (2004) by
Raymond Evans and Carole Ferrier, although broadly cultural and committedly activist,
are the work of Australianist literary scholars and represent a street-level rereading of
the ‘always alienated’ and fully human city.54
Regional production and institutions
The new regionalism I have been describing has also been supported and enhanced
by the rise of regionally focused publishing projects and regional funding agencies for
writers and writing, usually governmental. Important national publishing houses like
the University of Queensland Press and Fremantle Arts Centre Press, in the 1970s,
and Magabala Books, in the 1990s, for example, were also associated with regional
cultural movements, playing an active role in regional literary production and definition.
The institutional history of these publishers and their part in the growth of regional
literary cultures is an important aspect of Australia’s book history.55
Since the Whitlam
Government set up the Australia Council in 1973, including the Literature Board, as
one of its policy and funding art form boards, with a mission to support writers and
writing nationally, the states and territories have each developed their own funding and
institutional support for writers and writing. These have evolved in their individual ways,
sometimes closely associated with the premier’s or chief minister’s office, sometimes
at a greater administrative remove. The instigation of literary prizes (and associated
funding for festivals and events) has been a significant aspect of this regional subsidy of
contemporary writing. The more populous states of New South Wales and Victoria
have tended to badge their prizes with the names of writers particularly associated with
their literary history, while giving them a national scope: the Kenneth Slessor Prize for
Poetry (New South Wales Premier’s Awards), the Nettie Palmer Prize for Non-fiction
(Victorian Premier’s Awards). But South Australia does the same; the biennial Adelaide
Festival awards are national, but their poetry prize, for example, is named the John Bray
Poetry Award.
The other states and territories have often maintained a regional focus for their prizes,
like the Western Australian and Northern Territory awards for natives or residents, while
the National Word festivals in Canberra in the 1990s capitalised, literally, on Canberra’s
54 Guy Rundle, ‘Foreword’, in Jeff Sparrow and Jill Sparrow, Radical Melbourne 2: The Enemy Within, Vulgar,
2004, p. 11.
55 See chapters on UQP, Fremantle and Magabala, for example, in Craig Munro and Robyn Sheahan-Bright
(eds), Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia, 1946–2005, UQP, 2006.
566
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Nation, literature, location
dual presence as a simultaneously regional and national literary centre. Sometimes small
states have emphasised international literary perspectives, like Tasmania with its Pacific
Region prize of the 1990s. In 2006 a consortium of Melbourne-based benefactors,
moving in the opposite direction of localisation, inaugurated an annual Melbourne
Prize, thus narrowing its focus to the Victorian capital as a centre for writing. In
2008 the new directions in public patronage of literature were characterised by two
major government announcements, one state-based, one federal: the inaugural Western
Australian Premier’s Asia–Australia Literary Award and the Prime Minister’s Literary
Awards (fiction and non-fiction). Also in that year, Melbourne was named a UNESCO
City of the Book (Edinburgh is the only other so honoured).
Since the 1980s states and territories have also developed writers’ centres, subsidised
institutions that function as providers of services, resources and funding as well as
coordinating events for sub-state writing communities. Typical of such organisations
is this mission statement from the Queensland Writers’ Centre: ‘the QWC works to
advance the recognition of Queensland writers and writing, locally and nationally’.
While the history of the book in Australia, including its regional aspects, has received
serious critical and scholarly attention in recent years, the history of state and regional
institutions of literary patronage and cultural policy remains largely unwritten.
Writers themselves have always had slippery and mistrustful relations to entities like
nation, with multiple responses in their writing and in their lives to the spectrum of
what it might mean. Exile, after all, is one of the most ancient of literary subjectivities.
And the literary imagination is no respecter of boundaries and borders, however it
might take off from and reimagine the places it represents. All the same, place, environment
and locale have frequently been the most profoundly formative influences on
their imaginative work. And the evolving nature of the spatialised literary imagination
– now decentralised, relocalised, Indigenising, transnational – suggests a number
of focuses for the future work of critical regional reading: country, gothic Tasmania,
the poetics of ‘international regionalism’, transnational spatial identities, the Indigenous
city, quantitative literary regionalism, Carpentaria, Lemuria, regional book history, virtual
Australia, regional cultural policy, alternative literary geographies (the edge, the
insular, the trans-Indian Ocean), the town.56
As the literary imagination in Australia
continuously evolves in response to what country can mean, and to its own traditions
of spatial representations, literary history and critical reading also need to reorient their
theories and understandings of location.
56 See John Kinsella, ‘Poets Cornered’, Sydney Morning Herald (20 Jan. 2001), Spectrum, p. 8.
567
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