Doctor of Philosophy / This thesis explores the sense of place formed during childhood, as remembered by adult Australians who reconstruct their youth through various forms of life writing. While Australian writers do utilize traditional tropes of Western autobiography, such as the mythology of Eden and the Wordsworthian image of the child communing with Nature, these themes are frequently transformed to meet a uniquely Australian context. Isolation and distance from Europe, and the apparent indifference of our landscape towards white settlement, have received much critical attention in Australian studies generally and, indeed, broadly influence the formation of children’s sense of place across the continent. However, writers are also concerned with the role of place on a more local level. Through a comparison of writing from Western Australia, Queensland and Victoria, this thesis explores regional landscape preoccupations that create an awareness of local identity, variously contributing to or frustrating the child’s sense of belonging. Western Australian writing is dominated by images of isolation, the fragility of white settlement in a dry land lacking fresh water, and a pervasive beach culture. A strong sense of the littoral pervades writing from this region. Queensland’s frontier mythology is of a different flavour: warm and tropical, nature here is exuberant, constantly threatening to overwhelm culture, already perceived as transient due to the flimsy aspect of the “Queenslander” house. Writing from Victoria, to some extent, tends to more closely follow English models, juxtaposing country and city environments, although there is a distinctly local flavour to many representations of urban Melbourne and its flat, grid-like organization. As Australian society becomes more concentrated on the coastal fringe, the beach is an increasingly significant environment. Though more prominent in writing from some regions than others, coastal imagery broadly reflects the modern Australian’s sense of inhabiting a liminal zone with negotiable boundaries.

Doctor of Philosphy(PhD) / This thesis explores the sense of place formed during childhood, as remembered by adult Australians who reconstruct their youth through various forms of life writing. While Australian writers do utilize traditional tropes of Western autobiography, such as the mythology of Eden and the Wordsworthian image of the child communing with Nature, these themes are frequently transformed to meet a uniquely Australian context. Isolation and distance from Europe, and the apparent indifference of our landscape towards white settlement, have received much critical attention in Australian studies generally and, indeed, broadly influence the formation of children’s sense of place across the continent. However, writers are also concerned with the role of place on a more local level. Through a comparison of writing from Western Australia, Queensland and Victoria, this thesis explores regional landscape preoccupations that create an awareness of local identity, variously contributing to or frustrating the child’s sense of belonging. Western Australian writing is dominated by images of isolation, the fragility of white settlement in a dry land lacking fresh water, and a pervasive beach culture. A strong sense of the littoral pervades writing from this region. Queensland’s frontier mythology is of a different flavour: warm and tropical, nature here is exuberant, constantly threatening to overwhelm culture, already perceived as transient due to the flimsy aspect of the “Queenslander” house. Writing from Victoria, to some extent, tends to more closely follow English models, juxtaposing country and city environments, although there is a distinctly local flavour to many representations of urban Melbourne and its flat, grid-like organization. As Australian society becomes more concentrated on the coastal fringe, the beach is an increasingly significant environment. Though more prominent in writing from some regions than others, coastal imagery broadly reflects the modern Australian’s sense of inhabiting a liminal zone with negotiable boundaries.

Law controls our everyday. It regulates our lives. It tells us what is and is not acceptable behaviour, it confers and protects our rights, and it punishes us for our indiscretions. But law does much more than this. It creates normative standards which shape the way people are treated and the way that we relate to each other and to society generally. The law defines people. It constructs identity. And it creates the ‘other’. This is a legacy of positivism’s insistence on identifying that which is ‘inside’ law, and so accorded legitimacy, and that which is not. That which does not conform to law’s constructed standards and values is identified as ‘other’ and marginalised and silenced. In this thesis, I demonstrate the way that the law constructs ‘other’, in particular, the Aboriginal ‘other’. I consider the way that Aborigines have been defined by the law to show the consequences that this has had for Aboriginal people beyond the purely legal. I argue that law’s construction of Aboriginality has contributed to the marginalisation of Aboriginal people and their exclusion from many aspects of the legal and the social, and that it has silenced them within the dominant domain, denying them the ability to challenge the wrongs perpetrated against them. I examine these issues through the medium of literature. I argue that literature’s contribution to exposing, critiquing and challenging law’s construction of ‘other’ is invaluable. It informs the reader about the way that the law has treated Aboriginal people and, more generally, about the structures and limitations of our positivist legal system. It thereby contributes to the community’s perception and understanding of the way the law works, and the impact that it has on the lives of its subjects. Perhaps most importantly, it also educates towards social change and reform.

Thesis (MA)--University of Melbourne, School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts, 2010. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (p. 117-123)

Thesis (Ph.D.) - University of Queensland, 2003. / Includes bibliography.

No description available.

Orientador: Giséle Manganelli Fernandes / Banca: Laura Patricia Zuntini de Izarra / Banca: Peter James Harris / Resumo: O escritor australiano Peter Carey promove, em seu romance True History of the Kelly Gang, cuja primeira publicação ocorreu em 2000, a reinterpretação de um período histórico e também de um personagem da época, que se tornou uma figura forte na cultura australiana. A tradução desta obra foi publicada no Brasil em 2002 com o título A história do bando de Kelly. Esta dissertação tem como objetivo analisar os efeitos que o estabelecimento de uma colônia penal causou na cultura e na literatura australianas, e a utilização do texto literário - sobretudo esta obra de Carey - como espaço de debate sobre a identidade nacional e de questionamentos ou respostas à antiga metrópole. Para tanto, este trabalho traça, em primeiro lugar, um panorama da história da Austrália, até a época em que viveu Ned Kelly, um fora-dalei que se tornou herói popular e ícone nacional, e do desenvolvimento da literatura no país. Em segundo lugar, são analisados alguns aspectos deste romance, entre os quais a crítica ao sistema colonial britânico, a oposição centro-margem representada pelo conflito entre as autoridades e o bando de Kelly, e o uso da variante australiana do inglês. Desta forma, procuramos mostrar que, neste romance, parte da história da Austrália - em especial o período colonial e o sistema de degredo, cuja influência ainda se faz sentir nos dias de hoje - são problematizados e colocados em discussão. / Abstract: The Australian writer Peter Carey reinterprets, in his novel True History of the Kelly Gang, whose first publication took place in 2000, a historical period and also a character of that time who has become a strong figure in Australian culture. The translation of this book was published in Brazil in 2002, with the title A história do bando de Kelly. This Master's Degree Thesis has the objective of analyzing the effects that the settlement of a penal colony had on Australian culture and literature, and the use of literary texts - especially this work by Carey - as a space for debate on national identity and for questioning or striking back at the former centre. In order to do so, this work firstly presents a panorama of Australian history, up to the time Ned Kelly, an outlaw who became a popular hero and a national icon, lived, and a survey of the development of Australian literature. Then, some aspects of this novel are analyzed, such as the critique of the British colonial system, the opposition centre-margin represented by the conflict between the authorities and the Kelly gang, and the use of the Australian variant of English. Thus, it is possible to show that, in this novel, part of Australian history - particularly the colonial period and the transportation period, whose influence can still be felt nowadays - is questioned, discussed and reevaluated. / Mestre

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Note: This version has been edited to remove names for privacy reasons. For a full copy please contact the author. / Writers of PhDs have a unique, personal and in-depth relationship with their subject-matter, which develops over a number of years. What happens when life intrudes so much into the research and writing that it takes over the subject matter, so that the original struggle for objective scholarship threatens to become subsumed in emotion and self-discovery? How does the supervisor, forced to keep a certain distance from an intimate and tumultuous relationship, still teach? The supervisor can do worse than guide their student towards the genre of Life-Writing, within which a flourishing of sub-genres may be accommodating to such a journey. For a closed-records adoptee caught up in the reunion processes sparked by the 1990 changes to the Adoption Act, critical readings of Peter Carey and Janette Turner Hospital developed into the invention of the Adopted Body, the Subject Adoptee and a new way of seeing: ado/aptive reading and writing. Perhaps in the field of ado/aptive theory, the stolen generations, intercountry adoptees and the white closed-record adoptees of Australia can re-invent themselves, develop their identities and create a genre of academic theory unique to Australia.

Many Australian novelists since the late 1890s have written about dance in varied and interesting ways. Characters in many Australian novels are portrayed dancing on stage, dancing within the context of their everyday lives, watching corroborees, reminiscing about social dance events in distant homelands or gyrating under flashing lights at discos and raves. In other instances the word “dance” (or an associated term) is used metaphorically to convey actual or imagined movement such as the wind dancing in trees, or thoughts dancing in characters’ minds. Although representations of dance in Australian novels portray qualities such as vitality, beauty and transcendence, this thesis argues that they also elucidate a shadowland of pain and suffering and sometimes an uncertainty about Australian culture and identity. Indigenous dancers are scrutinised critically by non-Indigenous spectators. Despite the bright lights and glamour of their world, professional dancers are shown to struggle against the persistence of the cultural cringe. Unflattering notions of class and gender taint the excitement and romance of social dance occasions, migrant characters associate dance with painful memories of abandoned homelands and dancers performing professionally or privately risk being labelled mad, feminine or homosexual (or all three). The metaphorical use of the word dance does not always portray vital movement but often conveys heaviness, awkwardness and even imminent collapse. Descriptions of dance are minimalist to the point where the dance almost disappears from the reader’s view. As well as making dance in Australian novels visible, the investigation conducted in this thesis sharpens awareness of its negative or “shadow” side and challenges the widespread critical glorification of the presence of dance in literature more generally. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 313-325) Specific concern is the poetic, as well as literal, significance given to the environment, and in particular to land, as a measure of belonging in Australia. Environment is explored in the context of ecologies, offered here as an alternative configuration of the nation, and in which the subject, through human and non-human environmental relations, can be culturally and spatially positioned. Argues that both environment and ecology are narrowly defined in dominant discourses that pursue an ideal, certain and authentic belonging for non-indigenous Australians.