This thesis is a study of constructions of home and nation in selected works by Patrick White, Peter Carey, Xavier Herbert and James Bardon. Drawing on the work of postcolonial theorists, it examines ways in which the selected texts engage with national mythologies in the imagining of the Australian nation. It notes the deployment of racial discourses informing constructions of national identity that work to marginalise Indigenous Australians and other cultural minority groups. The texts are arranged in thematic rather than chronological order. White’s treatment of the overland journey, and his representations of Aboriginality, discussed in Chapter One, are contrasted with Carey’s revisiting of the overland journey motif in Oscar and Lucinda in Chapter Two. Whereas White’s representations of Indigenous culture in Voss are static and essentialised, as is the case in Riders in the Chariot and A Fringe of Leaves, Carey’s representation of Australia’s contact history is characterised by a cultural hybridity. In White’s texts, Indigenous culture is depicted as an anachronism in the contemporary Australian nation, while in Carey’s, the words of the coloniser are appropriated and employed to subvert the ideological colonial paradigm. Carey’s use of heteroglossia is examined further in the analysis of Illywhacker in Chapter Three. Whereas Carey treats Australian types ironically in Illywhacker’s pet emporium, the protagonist of Xavier Herbert’s Poor Fellow My Country, Jeremy Delacy, is depicted as an expert on Australian types. The intertextuality between Herbert’s novel and the work of social Darwinist anthropologists in the 1930s and 1940s is discussed in Chapter Four, providing a historical context to appreciate a shift from modernist to postmodernist narrative strategies in Carey’s fiction. James Bardon’s fictional treatment of the Papunya Tula painting movement in Revolution by Night is seen to continue to frame Indigenous culture in a modernist grammar of representation through its portrayal of the work of Papunya Tula artists in the terms of ‘the fourth dimension’. Bardon’s novel is nevertheless a fascinating postcolonial engagement with Sturt’s architectural construction of landscape in his maps and journals, a discussion of which leads to Tony Birch’s analysis of the politics of name reclamation in contemporary tourism discourses.

This thesis is an examination of English evocations of translatio studii et imperii during the Hundred Years War. According to the myth of translatio, intellectual and martial superiority were entwined and together moving ever-westwards, from Athens, to Rome, to Paris, and thence - the English claimed - to England. This study contributes to an understanding of how late-fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English aristocrats and clerics understood and legitimized their cultural struggle with France not only as a martial battle but also as an intellectual competition. It also explores how this struggle contributed to the cultural authority of libraries and book collections. The first chapter of this thesis traces the development of the translatio studii et imperii tradition from its ancient origins to its zenith in the reign King Charles V "the Wise" of France. This chapter serves to establish the historiographical implications of the translatio myth as well as the French translatio tradition to which the English responded. The second chapter of this study is devoted to a literary analysis of texts which explicitly evoke the translatio topos and which were composed or copied in England during the Hundred Years War, such as Bishop Richard de Bury's Philobiblon and Ranulf Higden's Polychronicon, as well as Oxford and Cambridge university foundation myths. The third chapter explores the extent to which late-medieval England's book culture resonated with English evocations of translatio. Central to this exploration is the underhanded acquisition of Charles V's monumental French royal library by the English regent of France, John, Duke of Bedford. As is attested in the writings of French court scholars, the monumental French royal library was held to symbolise France's cultural superiority over England during the Hundred Years War. Bedford's manoeuvre can be seen as a bid to transfer Europe's seat of learning, and by extant of power, to England. This thesis concludes with a consideration of the translatio myth's ambivalent implications for contentious master narratives such as the rise of nationalism and of the English language in late-medieval England.