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Framed by Reconciliation: Reading Cross-Cultural Space in Early Twenty-First- Century Australian Literature

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Framed by Reconciliation: Reading Cross-Cultural Space in Early Twenty-First- Century Australian Literature View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Federation ResearchOnline Framed by Reconciliation: Reading Cross-Cultural Space in Early Twenty-First- Century Australian Literature Demelza Hall Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy School of Education and Arts Federation University Australia PO Box 663 University Drive, Mount Helen Ballarat, Victoria 3353 Australia May 2015 Contents Abstract i Statement of Authorship ii Acknowledgements iii 1. Introduction: Reading Reconciliatory Space 1 1.1. Writing Australia’s National Condition 10 1.2. Imaginal Pedagogies of Reconciliation 19 1.3. Home: Frameworks of Reconciliatory Space 23 2. ‘The Gap’: Framing Bridging 32 2.1. The Rhetoric of Reconciliation 34 2.2. Revisioning Conciliation 41 2.3. Theorising ‘the Gap’ in Postcolonial Criticism 48 3. The Colonial Homestead: Framing Impasse 56 3.1. Undoing the Colonial Homestead 59 3.2. The Secret River 66 3.3. Her Sister’s Eye 74 4. Interspaces: Framing Transformation Through ‘Dwelling-in-Motion’ 84 4.1. Patterns of Movement: Interspaces and Connectivity 88 4.2. Sorry 94 4.3. Journey to the Stone Country 105 4.4. Carpentaria (1) 114 5. Island Exile: Framing Heterotopia 125 5.1. Islands of Possibility: Reading Exilic Space 129 5.2. Carpentaria (2) 135 5.3. Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish 147 5.4. Dirt Music 155 6. Country: Framing Well-being 168 6.1. Country: An Earthly Home for All? 174 6.2. Landscape of Farewell 181 6.3. That Deadman Dance 190 7. Conclusion: Spaces of Hope and Entanglement 201 List of Works Cited 204 Abstract This thesis analyses literary works by Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian writers, focussing on the production and function of space in scenes of constructive cross-cultural interaction. All of the novels examined can be read as pedagogies of reconciliation due to their engagement with – and subversion of – the goals, processes, issues, and outcomes of the 1990s reconciliation movement. Yet, while these texts are all broadly framed by reconciliation, this thesis argues that it is their commitment to reimagining spaces of home which marks them as particularly productive reconciliatory pedagogies. One of the primary assertions of this thesis is that for reconciliatory discourses to become useful pedagogies – to educate and inspire and connect people, rather than just inform and unsettle – they need to create spaces of hope. Home became a contested site during the reconciliation years, with processes of historical revisioning and reports such as Bringing Them Home forcing a reconsideration of what it might actually mean to be at home. By moving away from traditional domestic spaces and staid conceptions of dwelling, these narratives attempt to heterogeneously reconfigure notions of home and nation. This thesis is organised around specific spaces and spatial metaphors, and the critical paradigms informing them. Chapter 2, for example, examines ways in which the metaphor of ‘the Gap’ structures ideas of intercultural exchange in reconciliatory discourse and postcolonial criticism. Chapter 3 – which analyses Kate Grenville’s The Secret River and Vivienne Cleven’s Her Sister’s Eye – focusses on the space of the colonial homestead and how it is used to frame notions of impasse, or unbelonging. Chapter 4 examines a series of “interspaces” and how “dwelling-in-motion” frames cross-cultural transformation in Alex Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country, Gail Jones’s Sorry and Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria. Moving away from traditional conceptions of home, Chapter 5 analyses how heterotopic spaces are deployed to frame scenes of exile in Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, Tim Winton’s Dirt Music and Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish. Chapter 6 explores how conceptions of being in country frame notions of belonging and well-being in Alex Miller’s Landscape of Farewell and Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance. Finally, in conclusion, Chapter 7 suggests that spaces of hope can emerge in reconciliatory discourses when home, like nation, is recognised as a site of entanglement. Statement of Authorship Except where explicit reference is made in the text of the thesis, this thesis contains no material published elsewhere or extracted in whole or in part from a thesis by which I have qualified for or been awarded another degree or diploma. No other person’s work has been relied upon or used without due acknowledgment in the main text and bibliography of the thesis. Signed: Date: 4/12/2014 Acknowledgements This has been a long and ambitious project which I would not have been able to complete without the intellectual support of my wonderful friends and colleagues at Federation University Australia. I would like, firstly, to acknowledge the University for my Australian Postgraduate Award and for the extra funding they provided me with to travel to conferences in New Zealand and Japan and promote my research. I would also like to thank my supervisors, Associate Professor Meg Tasker (from Federation University) and Dr Lorraine Sim (from the University of Western Sydney), for all of the help and support they have offered me, as mentors and as friends, over the past six years. Part of this dissertation (Chapter 5, Section 2) was published in Southerly 72.3 (2012) as an article entitled “The Isle of Refuse in Alexis Wright's Carpentaria: Reconstituting Heterotopic Space.” I would like to thank Associate Professor Elizabeth McMahon for the feedback and encouragement she gave me during the drafting stages of this essay, and acknowledge the impact her editorial comments have had upon my overall project. Finally, and most importantly, I would like to acknowledge the support of my family (especially my beautiful husband and daughter, John and Delphi); you have all been so patient, thank you for giving me the time to do this. 1 Introduction Reading Reconciliatory Space It was a mystery, but there was so much song wafting off the watery land, singing the country afresh as they walked hand in hand out of town, down the road, Westside, to home. - Alexis Wright, Carpentaria (519) Alexis Wright, in her essay for the Sydney Pen entitled “A Question of Fear,” foregrounds the pedagogical power of story by claiming that “it will increasingly become the role of literature to explain what is happening in the home of humanity, by speaking honestly to the world where those who represent us politically do not” (169). Since the passing of the official end date of reconciliation – December 20001 – a number of literary works have been published which engage with the processes, problems and potential for reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians. Focussing upon specific spaces, spatial metaphors and concepts of dwelling, this dissertation analyses the ways in which early twenty-first century Australian novels – such as Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005), Vivienne Cleven’s Her Sister’s Eye (2002), Gail Jones’s Sorry (2007), Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria (2006), Alex Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country (2002) and Landscape of Farewell (2007), Tim Winton’s Dirt Music (2001), Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish: A Story in Twelve Fish ( 2001) and Kim Scott’s That Deadman Dance (2010) – are framed by the pedagogical goals, issues, themes and outcomes of the reconciliation movement. In the year 2000, Kim Scott and Thea Astley co-won the prestigious Miles Franklin Award2 for their respective novels Benang from the Heart and Drylands: A Book 1 In 1991 the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation Act “instituted a formal ten-year process of reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people. This process aimed to reconcile Indigenous and non-Indigenous people by the end of 2000, in time for the centenary of the Commonwealth of Australia in 2001” (Gunstone, “Reconciliation” 2). 2 The Miles Franklin Award is Australia’s largest literary prize awarded each year to a novel by an Australian writer which “is of the highest literary merit and presents Australian life in any of its phases” For more information, see the “Home Page” on Miles Franklin Literary Award website (http://www.milesfranklin.com.au/). 1 Introduction 2 for the World’s Last Reader. Exploring scenes of cross-cultural interaction in claustrophobic regional Australian settings, both Benang and Drylands are distinctly marked by the legacy of colonial violence. In each text, characters grapple with the impact of unresolved trauma – two centuries worth of accumulative violence and racist government policies – and search (hopelessly at times) for somewhere to belong; for a meaningful connection to people, place and cultural heritage. At a narrative level, the possibility for reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians is problematised in both Benang and Drylands. In Scott’s Benang, for instance, the need for Noongar people to try and recover their own culture and history – to consolidate a sense of Noongar identity based upon a specific connection with place – is given priority over the nation’s desire to officially bridge the gap between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people (Oost 118-119). Like Scott, Astley is a writer who refuses to “offer her readers […] any easy answers” (Kossew, “Review” 2). Despite the fact that Drylands does not centre on interactions between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians as Benang does, the contemporary legacy of colonial trauma creates a fault line in the text; revealing how relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people are still entangled in systems of colonial violence. As these brief examples suggest, both Benang and Drylands are intent on unsettling, rather than promoting reconciliation. Yet, while the potential for reconciliation is creatively destabilised in these novels – and treated as a concept which is innately uneven in expectation and, in light of historical revisioning and contemporary racism, too soon to be seriously contemplated let alone achieved – both Benang and Drylands remain explicitly and implicitly embedded within multiple “frames” of reconciliation.
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