2001 AAALS Conference Program

2001:  An Australian Odyssey

Rollins College

Winter Park, Florida

April 19-21

Thursday evening, April 19

7:00 PM   Reception at the Alumni House, Rollins Campus

          Registration

          Welcome:  Hoyt Edge, McKean Professor of Philosophy, and  

                             Conference Organizer

Patricia Lancaster, Interim Provost, Rollins College

          Reading by Joan London, *

from Gilgamesh, her new novel

Friday, April 20 – Conference held in the Galloway Room,                                                 The Mills Building

8:30 AM Coffee and Registration:  Hall outside of the Galloway Room

9:00 AM  Welcome from Rita Bornstein, President of Rollins College

9:15 AM  Discovering Australian Character

Chair: Robert Zeller, Southeast Missouri State University

Andreas Gaile, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität, Mainz: Remythologizing an Australian Legend: The True History of the Kelly Gang, by Peter Carey

AndreasGaile@t-online.de

“Australian history,” wrote Mark Twain in 1897, reads “like the most beautiful lies.” Peter Carey has invested much of his creative energy into re-assessing his nation’s problematic past (Illywhacker, Oscar and Lucinda). In his latest novel, Carey re-imagines the life of one of Australia’s most controversial historical personages: Ned Kelly. My presentation focuses on Carey’s strategy of deconstructing the most obstinate myths obscuring the historical Kelly and the fictional reconstruction of the legend in Carey’s “true history.”

Postmodern and postcolonial notions of history are fictionally exemplified in the novel. The textual status of Ned’s autobiography is of as much interest in this context as his subversion of official accounts of his story. 

Carey shows great sympathy for Ned, who embodies such Australian key virtues as mateship and anti-authoritarianism. Kelly’s acts of rebellion--ranging from affronts against polite society such as his deviation from Standard English to head-on confrontations with the police--Carey makes us believe, are understandable: his version of Australia 120 ago is far from the historical glory of “Australia Felix.” Carey’s characters often struggle against an unrelenting squattocracy and the despotism of the colonial administration. His voluminous re-creation of the history of the Kelly Gang is, therefore, one more step towards an honest representation of Australian history, taking into account the current public debate about righting historical wrongs.

Marty Wechselblatt, University of Cincinnati:  Doing Time Downunder

ksmw@earthlink.net

Australia may hold the distinction of having published more national histories per capita than any other new world nation. And yet, it has been a irrepressible tenant of faith among them that Australia really has no history.  My paper discusses what I understand as the two major conceptions of historical time governing contemporary discussions of reconciliation and national identity among white Australians: an appropriation of Aboriginal notions, "the timeless land"; and a time of moral accountancy, clock time, a type of time designed to conquer space and supervise populations.  I trace the latter to the techniques of settlement and penal regulation; and the former to the loosening of immigration restrictions, the "opening to Asia," and the Keating Government's Aboriginal initiatives.  At the theoretical center of these historical conjunctions is a certain orientation toward chance and contingency--expressed in the popular embrace of Horne's ironic label the "lucky country," and in the notion of the "fair go"--that has its origins in the effect of social amnesia characteristic of transportation.

Andrew Wainwright, Dalhousie University:  Landscape and Desire in Julia Leigh’s The Hunter

darl@is.dal.ca

"Landscape and Desire in Julia Leigh's The Hunter" will explore the protagonist's journey through his own heart of darkness and his confusion of troubled self with natural-world topographies and their inhabitants

10:45 AM Break – Refreshments compliments of International Programs,

       Rollins College

11:00 AM   Boldrewood

Chair: Charles Arnade, University of South Florida

David Callahan, University of Aviero:  Hiding and Solidity in the Work of Rolf Boldrewood And James Fenimore Cooper

callahan@mail.ua.pt

Both James Fenimore Cooper and Rolf Boldrewood are central representatives of the assertions of white, male identities in the foundation narratives of their respective nations (although Boldrewood is one who is referred to but little investigated at present).  However, for both writers concealment and secrecy are as or more important than any assertion of identity.  In crucial novels their protagonists spend more time hidden, assuming other identities, or worrying about exposure than they do in modes of open self-presentation or the celebration of presence.  This cloaking may take different forms in Boldrewood’s work, from the disguises of Robbery Under Arms to what Robert Dixon refers to with reference to Hereward Pole [in The Miner’s Right]: “English characters must cross-dress as diggers to enter this democratic society” (Dixon, 1998: 71).  In Cooper’s work, however, strategies of disguise are both more varied and more crucial, which may help explain why Cooper remains significant, albeit not without being contested, while Boldrewood has largely faded from view apart from the one novel in which secrecy is central.  This paper tries to unravel some of these issues.

Elaine Zinkhan, Toronto:  A. P. Watt and Company Records: A Major Resource For Australian Publishing History: with Particular Reference to Thomas Alexander Browne (‘Rolf Boldrewood’)

ejz@sympatico.ca

         The archives of the literary agent Alexander Pollack Watt (1838-1914)—by scholarly repute the first successful British literary agent—provide an outstandingly rich resource for researchers in Australian publishing history

         While A.P. Watt and Company materials are located in several manuscript repositories, my paper will refer principally to Australian materials in the wonderful collection held by Wilson Library, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.  The ‘Watt/Wilson’ archive documents sales to ‘publishing companies, newspapers, magazines, broadcasting corporations, and film studios.’ Records date from 1888 and extend to 1985.

         Australian authors represented in the Watt/Wilson archive include Louis Becke, Guy Boothby, ‘Rolf Boldrewood’, Ada Cambridge, Mary Gaunt, Fergus Hume, Henry Lawson, Brian Penton, Ethel Turner and others.

         My paper provides (a) a brief history of A.P. Watt and Company (b) citation of Australian materials (c) examination of Thomas Alexander Browne’s association with a.P. Watt, including Browne’s early attempts to locate a literary agent; advances and royalties; print-runs of  Robbery Under Arms; serial publication; sale of dramatic rights.  I will conclude with Browne’s own assessment of A.P. Watt, the ‘great Napoleon of the realms of print.’

12 Noon: Lunch on your own in Winter Park; consult registration packet

2:00 PM  Following the Torch: The Australian Olympics

Mark O’Connor *

2:45 PM  Panel: Teaching Australian Studies

John Scheckter, C. W. Post Campus, Long Island University

3:30 PM Global Crossings

       Chair: Faye Christenberry, University of Kansas

Carolyn Bliss, University of Utah: Cheers, Jeers, and Justified Fears:                        Twentieth-CenturyAustralian Novelists Look at America

Bliss_C@ugs.utah.edu

The paper is on the Australian perception of America, as demonstrated in novels of the last half century. I want to focus on Patrick White's The Aunt's Story, Murray Bail's Homesickness, and Peter Carey's The Unusual Life of Tristan Smith, with bows to some other writers and works. The paper would argue that the "cheers, fears, and jeers" which characterize Australian ambivalence toward America account in at least some small measure for the Australian rejection in November 1999 of the proposition that Australia should become a fully independent republic.

Nicholas Birns, New School:  “An Ideographic Prophecy”: A New Overview of Furphy’s Such is Life

Nicbirns@aol.com

Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life, published in 1903, at the beginning of a century of experimentation in the novel, expands or interrogates the inherited form of the novel as much as any avowedly modernist or postmodernist work.  It is a truism to say that its publication in the Australia of its time could not have been anticipated; its experimentation is thus idiosyncratic, almost a fluke, and not at all a part of a calculated program of innovation.  This paper will reassert this work’s status as an Australian classic.  I will dispute the hegemony of the ‘authorship’ issue in Furphy criticism; whereas many critics see the pseudonym under which Furphy wrote the book, “Tom Collins” as exemplifying a perspective substantially different from the author, I argue that this focus obscures the book’s structural, formal, and allusive complexities.  Furphy’s profound relationship to Shakespeare and the Bible, and his repudiation of nineteenth-century British narrative conventions, are given full scope.  His combination of vernacular yarning and speculative learning affirms both the fundamental democracy of the Australian character as well as its speculative reach—in this way paralleling American writers as different as Herman Melville, Mark Twain, and Zora Neale Hurston.  Finally, Such is Life’s global reach in terms of significance is contrasted with its strictly local and Australian implied audience, suggesting that the works most marketable to the world as ‘Australian’ may eventually be a less permanent part of world literature than local surprises such a Furphy’s inimitable novel.

Shirley Paolini, University of Houston-Clear Lake: Nature and Epiphanies in David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon and James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

LEBEAO@aol.com

In David Malouf’s novel, Remembering Babylon, several of the characters experience moments resembling the epiphany of James Joyce’s hero Stephen Dedalus.  Joyce’s description of the wading girl in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man focuses upon Stephen’s perception as an aesthetic moment.  In Malouf’s work, his protagonist Gemmy Fairley, Janet McIvor, and her father Jock all undergo moments that manifest illumination.  Janet, the daughter of a Scottish colonist, experiences a special moment when she is working with a bee hive and suddenly is covered by the swarm of bees.  Through this experience she becomes one with nature:  “she had been drawn into the process and mystery of things” (143).  A young British boy, washed ashore, is discovered by the Aborigines and becomes one of them.  When he leaves the colonists and goes back to the Aborigines, he enters a state of illumination.  This is an immanent state in which he perceives nature as immediately present.  Similarly, Jock McIvor, Janet’s father, gazes at “wee bright insects” and “the discovery of them, the new light they brought to the scene, was a lightness in him—like a form of knowledge he had broken through to.  It was unnamable…” (107).

While both Malouf and Joyce use natural images to convey these states—bees in the case of Janet McIvor and a seabird in the case of Stephen—Malouf’s epiphanies offer a natural transcendence while Joyce relies on aesthetics.  Stephen looks at the wading girl and is illumined.  He sees before him a girl gazing out to sea:  “She seemed like one whom magic had changed into the likeness of a strange and beautiful seabird…. her eyes turned to him in quiet sufferance of his gaze without shame or wantonness…--Heavenly God! Cried Stephen’s soul, in an outburst of profane joy” (171).  But  Janet, covered by bees, enters into an immediate apprehension of nature.  Later, she can recall this moment and can sustain it through her memory:  “the single mind of the hive, closed on itself, on its secret, which her own mind approaches and draws back from, the moment of illumination when she will be filled again with it” (199).  Joyce’s epiphany produces more distance between subject and object and exists aesthetically.  While Joyce’s aesthetics are rooted in St. Thomas Aquinas’s definition of the beautiful, Malouf has moved to a pantheistic naturalism.  His response is both post-colonial and postmodern.  At the end of the novel “a line of running fire, all the outline of the vast continent appears, in touch now with its other life” (200).

6:30 PM  Banquet  in the Bieberbach-Reed Room, Campus Center

          Banquet Speaker:  Michael King, CANZ, Georgetown University

                   Janet Frame: Antipodean Phoenix in the American Chicken

                   Coop

Saturday, April 21

8:45 Continental Breakfast – compliments of International Programs

9:30 AM Reading by Mark O’Connor *

10:00 AM Underclasses

Chair: Robert Ross

Sigrun Meinig, Mannheim University: A Myth of Captivity: Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves

meinig@rumms.uni-mannheim.de

The central metaphor of captivity encapsulated in the Eliza Fraser story invites reflection on the relationship between individual and society in Patrick White’s novel A Fringe of Leaves. The protagonist Ellen Roxburgh negotiates her position within a variety of groups--of race, class and gender--and experiences the limitations of her autonomy in such negotiations as different forms of captivity. The paradigm of myth presents itself as a particularly apt perspective for the analysis of this constellation. After all, the nineteenth-century story of the shipwrecked white lady among an Aboriginal tribe on a continent occupied by a convict colony has become a myth to which a variety of artists and with them the Australian public have repeatedly returned. In addition to reworking this myth in its plot, White’s novel displays several features of mythical narratives, among them circularity and a specific rendering of time. This paper examines the emphasis on myth in both plot and structure of White’s 1976 novel with the help of Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of myth. For Ricoeur, myths fulfil critical social functions and hold the potential for liberation. As a consequence, the paper’s analysis takes Australia’s colonial context as its focus in order to determine whether A Fringe of Leaves turns the various modes of captivity it presents into a mythical journey towards liberation, bearing signals of a future, post-colonial Australia.

Elizabeth Webby, University of Sydney: The Traveling Heroine in                            Some Recent Australian Novels

elizabeth.webby@english.usyd.edu.au

Considers three novels published in 2000 by some of Australia's major male writers: Tom Keneally, Bethany's Book, Rodney Hall, The Day We Had Hitler Home, and Frank Moorhouse, Dark Palace.  I believe this paper would fit well with the theme of the conference as all three novels involve women who spend many years away from Australia, though they are in other respects very different.  I am interested in examining the reasons why all these established writers have now chosen to focus on the female perspective as well as the international one.  I will also discuss the ways in which Hall and Keneally  explore racial issues via their respective heroines' love affairs with African men.  All three novels contrast markedly with the other major Australian novel of 2000, Peter Carey's The True History of the Kelly Gang, which remains resolutely based both in Australia and in the male voice.

Chris Lee, University of Southern Queensland:  An Uncultured Rhymer and His Cultural Critics: Henry Lawson, Class Politics and Colonial Literature

leec@usq.edu.au

Lawson's desire to achieve a literary reputation during the 1890s was complicated by his aspirations to mould the political will of his audience and his material situation as a working class colonial writer. If we are to understand Lawson as a politically active writer in colonial Australia, then we have to understand the way in which he developed his verse (as well as the prose) in the periodical outlets available to him at the time. We also have to understand the ways in which this work was then collected in book form as part of a broader project of social influence. Such an account will need to understand Lawson's literary output as an expression of the available institutional contexts for the production and reception of colonial writing. This more material understanding of Lawson's contemporary significance redirects attention from the aesthetic sophistication of the writings to its social, cultural and political purchase. If we are once again to become interested in Lawson's political project, then we require a renewed understanding of the role of the poetry in the development of his literary career. This new understanding, I intend to argue, shows that academics have replicated a number of the cultural assumptions of Lawson's contemporary critics and this has led to a failure to recognize a body of work which continues to have a significant cultural value in relation to more recent debates about the widening divide between the metropolitan and regional cultures within modern Australia. 

Jim Hoy, Emporia State University: Glen McLaren: Contemporary Chronicler of the Outback

HOYJAMES@esumail.emporia.edu>

Glen McLaren, a horsebreaker who has trained over 1500 colts for the racetracks of Western Australia, is also a Ph.D. from Curtin Institute of Technology who has undertaken to document the Outback, from the bushcraft of Australia's nineteenth-century explorers to the folkways of cattle-droving stockmen to the history of the cattle industries of the Northern Territory and the Kimberley.  This presentation is based on an interview with McLaren at his training stable near Perth as well as on his four books. 

12:00  Panel:  Directions for Antipodes

12:45 PM  Business Meeting

*Joan London and Mark O’Connor have been assisted by the

       Commonwealth Government of Australia through the Australia

       Council, its arts funding and advisory body.

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