Antonella Riem. Gesture of Reconciliation: Partnership Studies in Australian Literature

Antonella Riem. Gesture of Reconciliation: Partnership Studies in Australian Literatur

Antonella Riem, A Gesture of Reconciliation: Partnership Studies in Australian Literature

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'Double Line to the Terminus': Marriage, Sex, Romance and Joseph Furphy

This article reads Furphy's fiction in the context of his own failed marriage. It notes Furphy's interest in sex and romance, and his insistence on a degree of sexual realism despite the inhibitions of Victorian decorum. Referring to some of the unstated elements in the story of Alf Morris and Molly Cooper and the more ludicrous treatments of sex in Such is Life, and the rape story in Rigby's Romance, the article argues that Furphy contributes to our understanding of sexual behaviour in nineteenth century Australia

Postmodernism, History and Satire: David Foster and Salman Rushdie

A comparison of David Foster's The Glade Within the Grove and Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses, reading them as satires

'Riverina rasped the scales from my eyes’: Riverina politics in Furphy’s Such is Life

Joseph Furphy admitted that his politics changed radically after ‘the usages of Riverina rasped the scales from my eyes’. This article argues that the political importance of Such is Life is its observation of the conditions in the Riverina that led to Furphy’s political shift; it is based on practical experience rather than the more theoretical politics of Rigby’s Romance. The novel is set in the years before the 1884 Land Act divided Riverina squatting runs in half, and a series of droughts and depressions ended the Golden Age of Squatting. The main political issue in Such is Life—the alienation of the land by a privileged few—reflects the concerns of European migrants who saw land as the source of individual wealth and equality but Furphy’s treatment of the various squatters in the novel, and his sympathy for some of them, suggests that their individual morality can do little to change an unjust system. The paper argues that Such is Life marks a political transition not only for Furphy, but for Australian democrats, from the liberal belief that small landholdings under individual ownership would be the source of justice to a more socialist commitment to communal action

Displaced from the Sacred Sites: David Foster’s In the New Country and The Land Where Stories End

David Foster’s novels consistently interpret Australia as 'colonial', with its white settlers denied any spiritual connection with the natural environment, and its indigenous people displaced and damaged by white settlement. Moonlite (1981) follows the displacement of indigenous people from the outlying islands of Scotland to become the settlers of a colony like Australia, and in turn displace the Aborigines. The Glade Within the Grove proposes a radical new religion, based on the castration rites of the ancient world, that might overcome white Australians’ alienation from the land with a new commitment to the environment. But Foster’s most recent novels suggest a loss of hope in Australia, as In the New Country offers a farcical parody of The Glade, and The Land Where Stories End seeks spiritual consolation in a fairytale set in seventh-century Ireland, that recalls the sacred sites of the Scottish islanders in Moonlite. This article examines these two novels as the impossible search of a 'colonial mongrel' for a sacred place, in Ireland or Australia, and the signs that such a place may belong in a lost time, only accessible through writing. In Foster’s novels writing is the last resort for the sacred, in a world engulfed by a global economic imperialism