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

revie

'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

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributor

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

Peter Yeldham's Reunion Day: An Anzac Day Play on British Television

Though a few naturalist plays from the 1950s and 1960s are acknowledged in Australian drama history, the plays written for television by Australians who went to Britain and America have disappeared from consideration. This article discusses one of them, Peter Yeldham's Reunion Day as an example of the naturalism current in British television in the early 1960s. It discusses the play's deliberate restraint and depiction of 'ordinary' people. It also places the play in the context of other Australian plays that use Anzac Day or the veteran's reunion as subject matter. A copy of the screenplay is appended