Chapter 1 considers culture as a product of communication. The central problem is to understand how an array of influencing factors such as food supply, technology and physical and intellectual environment are represented, stored and shared as 'food culture'. It considers mechanisms by which culture might be transmitted from one location to another including the relevance of historical literature and Louis Hartz's notion of Australia as a 'cultural fragment' cast off from the Old World. Chapter 2 shows that the Australian literature represents a discourse in which information about various aspects of feeding was gathered from local and overseas sources and circulated for instruction, entertainment and use. The discourse and the means of conducting it were products of their age. Public participation was evident in the correspondence columns of weekly newspapers and in 'contributory' cookery books. The discourse drew on various themes that were prominent in other Western discourses and reflected social and moral values of the times. It evidenced beliefs that the manner of a society's feeding demonstrates the extent of its' civilisation and that refinement of food and feeding contributes to the improvement of society. It also reflected nationalist sentiment and demonstrated some attempts to develop a distinctive Australian cuisine. Chapter 3 supports these claims with detailed analysis of recipes published in a sample of journals and cookery books. Chapter 4 describes five instances which illustrate in more depth the influence of print media in culture development. The first two show deliberate use of print media to reform cookery practice. The third shows the role of print in cookery education, suggesting an alternative mechanism by which cookery in Australia retained its British character. The fourth tests the idea that the transmission of food and science cultural influences from the Old World to the New followed broadly similar paths and questions the origins of the domestic science movement. The fifth examines commercial influences exerted through print media and notes that food production, processing and distribution enterprise was to become increasingly influential as Australia (and other countries) turned to industrial feeding. The thesis concludes with some reflections on the processes of culture formation and the role of mass communications. It suggests that food culture is both an expression of conceptions of character and identity and a formative influence on them, that the engine of cultural change has been industrial progress and, finally, that the communication system which supports and enriches food culture may also tend to undermine it.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 166-168). / 168 leaves : ill. ; 30 cm. + 2 sound discs (CD) / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Primarily enacts a fictocritical mapping of local cultural events essentially concerned with crime and trauma in Adelaide. The fictocritical treatment of these events simulates their unresolved or traumatised condition. A secondary concern is the relationship between electronic writing (hypertext) and fictocriticism. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, Dept. of English, 2001

Includes the novel and exegetical essay. / With: "Knitting a novel" in the back section of the volume bound upside down. / Bibliography: p. 92-97. / 97, 244 p. ; 30cm. / Title page, contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University Library. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Adelaide, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Discipline of English, Creative Writing, 2006

I address a selection of texts published in Australia between 1993 and 1997 which engage with feminist debates about sex and power. These texts are important, I argue, because they signpost the historical moment in which the culture wars and globalisation gained force in Australia. A key word in this thesis is ‘framing’. The debates which my texts engage with have (much like the culture wars in general) commonly been framed as conflicts between polarised political factions. These political factions have, in turn, been framed in terms of generations; that is, an ‘older’ feminism is pitted against a ‘newer’ feminism. Each generation of feminists supposedly holds quite different views about sex. I argue that my texts actually provide an insight into how various feminist perspectives on sex diverge and intersect with each other, as well as with certain New Right discourses about sex. My selected texts also suggest how the printed text has helped transport feminism within and outside Australia / My texts fit into two broad genres, fiction and scholarly non-fiction. The texts are: Helen Garner’s The First Stone (1995), Sheila Jeffreys’ The Lesbian Heresy (1993), Catharine Lumby’s Bad Girls (1997), Linda Jaivin’s Eat Me (1995) and Justine Ettler’s The River Ophelia (1995). I engage with various critical responses to these texts, including reviews, essays and interviews with the authors. I draw also from a range of theoretical sources. These include analyses of the culture wars by the American theorist Lillian S. Robinson and the Australian scholars McKenzie Wark, David McKnight and Mark Davis. Davis has provided a useful overview of how the metaphor of ‘generational conflict’ circulated in Australian culture during the 1990s. I draw on Arjun Appadurai’s model of “global cultural flows” and Ann Curthoys’ history of feminism in Australia. I engage with research into the increasingly ‘globalised’ nature of Australian writing, as well as a number of feminist works on the relationship between sex and power

Masters Research - Master Creative Arts / Food, as a social signifier, is an important device in literature that has been used skilfully by writers like Woolf, Proust and Carver. My short story collection, A Taste of Dreams, employs food as a theme across the collection to reveal details about characters and the relationships between those who come together to cook and dine. The essay that follows examines suburban fiction and domestic routines including the preparation and consumption of food, food-related spaces such as the kitchen and dining table and the significance of meals beyond the food itself. Domestic fiction set in the Australian suburbs had a late and uncertain beginning. The image of the Australian bush and frontier dominated both art and literature through the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, well after the cities and suburbs were established. It was only after the Second World War, with the great postwar land boom, that artists and writers turned to the suburbs. Initially, this residential space, where the majority of Australians lived, was derided and spurned, viewed as homogeneous, status-oriented and uniformly conservative. Intellectuals attacked the architecture of the new landscape and concluded that the residents who bought into this lifestyle were conditioned by their streetscape. In the 1970s, new writers like Garner, Winton, Malouf and Updike emerged. They looked beyond the streetscape, front fence and lawns to reveal the details, the diversity and complexities of lives within the suburban milieu. Domestic situations were explored against a background of iconic symbols and signifiers—the backyard, shed, garage, bedroom, laundry and kitchen—to reveal the unique details of characters’ lives within the suburban home. A Taste of Dreams is a contribution to the genre of short story writing set in the Australian suburbs. Food links the stories and provides an avenue through which the reader can gain an understanding of the characters, their homes and their relationships.

Title page and prologue v.2; Title page, table of contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University of Adelaide Library. / "The stone crown is, in part, a contemporary reworking of the Arthurian legend." -- abstract, [v. 2], p. v. / http://proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/login?url= http://library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=1284280 / Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2007

Narratives of place have always been crucial to the construction of Australian identity. The obsession with identity in Australia betrays longstanding uncertainty. It is not difficult to interpret in this uncertainty a replaying of the deeper insecurities surrounding the settler community's legal and more broadly cultural claims to the land. Such insecurities are typically understood negatively. In contrast, this thesis accepts the uncertainty of identity as an activating principle, appropriate to any interpretation of the narratives and themes that inform what it means to be Australian. Fundamental to this uncertainty is a provisionality in the post-colonial experience of place that is papered over by misleadingly coherent spatial narratives that stem from the imperial inheritance of Australian mythology. Place is a model for the tension between the coherence of mythic narratives and the actual rhizomic formlessness of daily life. Place is the ???ground??? of that life, but an ambivalent ground. An Ambivalent Ground approaches postcolonial Australia as a densely woven text. In this text, stories that describe the founding of a nation are enveloped by other stories, not so well known, that work to transform those more familiar narratives. ???Re-placing Australian literature??? describes the process of this transformation. It signifies an interpretative practice which seeks to recuperate the open-ended experience of place that remains disguised by the coherent narratives of nationhood. The process of ???re-placing??? Australian literature shifts the understanding of nation towards a landscape that speaks not so much about identity as about the constitutive performances of everyday life. It also converges with the unhomely dimension that is the colonist's ambiguous sense of belonging. We can understand this process with an analogy used in this thesis, that of music ??? the colonising language, and noise ??? the ostensibly inchoate, unformed background disruptive to cultural order yet revealing the spatial realities of place. Traditionally, cultural narratives in Australia have disguised the much more complex way in which place noisily disrupts and diffracts those narratives, and in the process generates the ambivalence of Australian identity. Rather than a text or a narrative, place is a plenitude, a densely intertwined performance space, a performance that constantly renders experience ??? and its cultural function ??? transgressive. The purpose of this thesis is not to displace stereotypical narratives of nationhood with yet another narrative. Rather, it offers the more risky proposition that provisionality and uncertainty are constitutive features of Australian social being. The narrative in the thesis represents an aggregation of such an ambivalent ground, addressing the persistent tension between place and the larger drama of colonialist history and discourse.

Title page and prologue v.2; Title page, table of contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University of Adelaide Library. / "The stone crown is, in part, a contemporary reworking of the Arthurian legend." -- abstract, [v. 2], p. v. / http://proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/login?url= http://library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=1284280 / Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2007

Masters Research - Master Creative Arts / Food, as a social signifier, is an important device in literature that has been used skilfully by writers like Woolf, Proust and Carver. My short story collection, A Taste of Dreams, employs food as a theme across the collection to reveal details about characters and the relationships between those who come together to cook and dine. The essay that follows examines suburban fiction and domestic routines including the preparation and consumption of food, food-related spaces such as the kitchen and dining table and the significance of meals beyond the food itself. Domestic fiction set in the Australian suburbs had a late and uncertain beginning. The image of the Australian bush and frontier dominated both art and literature through the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, well after the cities and suburbs were established. It was only after the Second World War, with the great postwar land boom, that artists and writers turned to the suburbs. Initially, this residential space, where the majority of Australians lived, was derided and spurned, viewed as homogeneous, status-oriented and uniformly conservative. Intellectuals attacked the architecture of the new landscape and concluded that the residents who bought into this lifestyle were conditioned by their streetscape. In the 1970s, new writers like Garner, Winton, Malouf and Updike emerged. They looked beyond the streetscape, front fence and lawns to reveal the details, the diversity and complexities of lives within the suburban milieu. Domestic situations were explored against a background of iconic symbols and signifiers—the backyard, shed, garage, bedroom, laundry and kitchen—to reveal the unique details of characters’ lives within the suburban home. A Taste of Dreams is a contribution to the genre of short story writing set in the Australian suburbs. Food links the stories and provides an avenue through which the reader can gain an understanding of the characters, their homes and their relationships.

Title page and prologue v.2; Title page, table of contents and abstract only. The complete thesis in print form is available from the University of Adelaide Library. / "The stone crown is, in part, a contemporary reworking of the Arthurian legend." -- abstract, [v. 2], p. v. / http://proxy.library.adelaide.edu.au/login?url= http://library.adelaide.edu.au/cgi-bin/Pwebrecon.cgi?BBID=1284280 / Thesis (Ph.D.) -- University of Adelaide, School of Humanities, 2007