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. Whites treatment of the overland journey, and his representations of Aboriginality, discussed in Chapter One, are contrasted with Careys revisiting of the overland journey motif in Oscar and Lucinda in Chapter Two. Whereas Whites representations of Indigenous culture in Voss are static and essentialised, as is the case in Riders in the Chariot and A Fringe of Leaves, Careys representation of Australias contact history is characterised by a cultural hybridity. In Whites texts, Indigenous culture is depicted as an anachronism in the contemporary Australian nation, while in Careys, the words of the coloniser are appropriated and employed to subvert the ideological colonial paradigm.
Careys use of heteroglossia is examined further in the analysis of Illywhacker in Chapter Three. Whereas Carey treats Australian types ironically in Illywhackers pet emporium, the protagonist of Xavier Herberts Poor Fellow My Country, Jeremy Delacy, is depicted as an expert on Australian types. The intertextuality between Herberts 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 Careys fiction.
James Bardons 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. Bardons novel is nevertheless a fascinating postcolonial engagement with Sturts architectural construction of landscape in his maps and journals, a discussion of which leads to Tony Birchs analysis of the politics of name reclamation in contemporary tourism discourses.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ADTP/216377 |
| Date | January 2003 |
| Creators | Brock, Stephen James Thomas, brock.stephen@saugov.sa.gov.au |
| Publisher | Flinders University. Australian Studies |
| Source Sets | Australiasian Digital Theses Program |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Rights | http://www.flinders.edu.au/disclaimer/), Copyright Stephen James Thomas Brock |
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