Re-Imagining the Convicts

Re-imagining the Convicts: History, Myth and Nation in Contemporary Australian Fictions of Early Convictism MARTIN JOHN STANIFORTH Submitted in accordance with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Leeds School of English July 2015 The candidate confirms that the work submitted is his own and that appropriate credit has been given where reference has been made to the work of others. This copy has been supplied on the understanding that it is copyright material and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement. © 2015 The University of Leeds and Martin John Staniforth The right of Martin John Staniforth to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. 1 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost my thanks go to my supervisor, Professor Stuart Murray, without whose encouragement, enthusiasm and challenge this thesis would be much the poorer. He provided me with valuable help and advice over the years when I was working on this subject and was generous with both his time and his knowledge. Second I am grateful to the University of Leeds for funding to support my attendance at conferences in Australia and New Zealand which enabled me both to present aspects of my work to a wider audience and to benefit from listening to, and discussing with, a range of scholars of Australian literature. Third I have benefitted from help from a number of libraries which have provided me with material. My thanks go to all the staff involved but particularly those at the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds, the British Library, and the State Library of New South Wales, Sydney. Last, but far from least, without the constant support of Gill Eastabrook I doubt this thesis would ever have been finished. She has lived with it since its inception, has read more of it more often than anyone else, and has coped cheerfully with the proliferation of books and articles on Australia in the house. To her I owe a huge debt. 2 The following publication originated from a section of this thesis: ‘Depicting the Colonial Home: Representations of the Domestic in Kate Grenville’s The Secret River and Sarah Thornhill’, Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 13.2 (2013) 12 pp. <http://www.nla.gov.au/openpublish/index.php/jasal/article/view/2720/3723>. 3 ABSTRACT This thesis examines the way in which a number of contemporary Australian novels use the contested figure of the early convict to reflect on, and participate in, the recent heated debates over Australian history and culture. It argues that while these novels represent an attempt to challenge the traditional narrative of the nation’s past promulgated by the Anglo-Celtic settler population, they predominantly reproduce rather than overturn the myths and stories that have been the hallmark of settler Australia. I examine the novels in three overlapping contexts: in relation to the way in which Australia’s convict history has shaped and influenced contemporary perceptions of nation and belonging; in relation to the tradition of convict fiction from Marcus Clarke onwards; and in relation to contemporary debates about Australian identity and history. I start with two contextual chapters: the first considers the foundational role of early convictism in creating the myths and stories that Anglo-Celtic Australians use to order their lives and how the convict legacy has left its mark on contemporary Australian society; the second examines the way in which early convict fiction established key aspects of settler history and identity, before considering how the genre of convict fiction responded to challenges to the nature of Australian society in the 1960s and 1970s. I then go on to examine critically the response of contemporary convict novels to the more fundamental challenges to traditional representations of Australian history and identity posed in the period immediately following the Bicentenary of British settlement, considering them in the contexts of Aboriginal dispossession, myths of exile and settler relationships to the land. I conclude that while these novels seek to reconceptualize the past they mostly fail to imagine an alternative vision for the country and consequently endorse rather than undermine the narratives they seek to challenge. 4 CONTENTS Acknowledgements 1 Abstract 3 Contents 4 Introduction 7 Making the Nation 8 Writing the Nation 15 Convict Nation 22 Thesis Structure 26 Chapter 1 The Convicts and Their Legacy 29 The Convicts in History 29 Myths and Stories 37 Convicts and Settler Attitudes 52 The Convicts in Fiction 64 Chapter 2 Continuity and Change: Convict Fiction 1870-1980 70 Foundational Fiction: Marcus Clarke’s For the Term 70 of His Natural Life The Fable of Colonization: Thomas Keneally’s Bring 80 Larks and Heroes Colonizing the Domestic: Jessica Anderson’s The 90 Commandant Encountering the Suppressed: Patrick White’s A 99 Fringe of Leaves Challenging Stories 106 5 Chapter 3 Performing Dispossession: Thomas Keneally, Kate 110 Grenville, Debra Adelaide and the Theatre of Colonization Bicentennial Blues 110 Acting History: Thomas Keneally’s The Playmaker 120 Playing Complicity: Kate Grenville’s The Secret 135 River and The Lieutenant Rewriting the Past: Debra Adelaide’s Serpent Dust 161 Restaging Settler History? 166 Chapter 4 Re(-)membering Home: Peter Carey and the 170 Imagination of Exile Myths of Exile 170 The Exile’s Return: Peter Carey’s Jack Maggs 177 Postcolonial Carey? 191 Demythologizing Carey 206 Chapter 5 Forging the Nation: Richard Flanagan, Rodney 210 Hall and the Rhetoric of Belonging Settling the Land 210 Tasmanian Gothic: Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book 226 of Fish Imagining the Alternative: Rodney Hall’s The Second 240 Bridegroom Land and Nation 256 Conclusion 262 Bibliography 269 Primary sources 269 Core texts 269 6 Other primary texts cited or discussed 269 Historical accounts 271 Secondary sources 272 7 INTRODUCTION When the English novelist Angela Carter visited Australia in 1987 she noted that Australian society was ‘inexhaustibly curious about itself, about the way it works, how it feels to be Australian’.1 This introspective gaze has a long history, explored by Richard White in his 1981 book Inventing Australia, where he describes Australians’ fascination with their identity as ‘a national obsession’.2 At the time Carter visited, the imminent Bicentenary of white settlement, or invasion, may have been prompting more profound soul-searching about aspects of Australian history and identity than had been the case in previous years. However the concern with the concept of Australianness was far from new, and it was to be central to the next twenty years of sharply contested and increasingly polarized argument over the Australian past. This thesis is concerned with the way in which a number of novels published broadly between 1988 and 2008, between the Bicentenary and the Australian Government’s Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples, use the early colonial period, and particularly the contested figure of the convict, as a lens through which to view the arguments over Australian culture and history.3 I will argue that this period saw a fundamental challenge to the Anglo-Celtic narrative of the nation’s past and to the myths and stories that underpin it, and that the historical fictions I discuss represent an attempt to re-imagine and re-envision that narrative. In doing so I will consider the novels in three overlapping contexts: in relation to the way in which Australia’s convict history has shaped and influenced contemporary perceptions of nation and belonging; in relation to the tradition of convict fiction from Marcus Clarke’s foundational novel, For the Term of His Natural Life (1874), onwards; and in relation to contemporary debates 1 Angela Carter, Shaking a Leg: Journalism and Writings (London: Vintage, 1998), p. 228. 2 Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1688-1980 (St Leonards, New South Wales: Allen & Unwin, 1981), p. viii. 3 Kevin Rudd, ‘Apology to Australia’s Indigenous Peoples’, Commonwealth of Australia House of Representatives, Debates, 13 February 2008, pp. 167-71. 8 about Australian identity and history.4 I will argue that, for all their apparently revisionist attitudes, these novels essentially reproduce rather than overturn the narratives that sustain white settler Australia, refurbishing and re-presenting them in a form appropriate for the twenty-first century. Before turning to the details of my argument I will use the rest of this introductory section to examine the central contextual issues that underpin my work: how nations and national identities are formed; the role of fictional writing in this work; how these processes operate in the Australian context; and the continuing relevance of the convict as a way of exploring Australian identity. I will conclude by discussing the selection of texts I have used and outlining the key elements of the thesis itself. Making the Nation Much of what I have to say in this thesis addresses the way in which the Australian nation and Australian national identity are constructed, and particularly the myths and narratives that underpin the idea of what it means to be Australian. To provide context for the issues I raise, I will look briefly at discussions on the way in which nations are formed before turning to how these processes have worked in Australia. Between 1960 and 1990 a number of theorists addressed the question of how nations are created, built and sustained.5 While adopting different approaches and coming from different theoretical positions, there was a consensus among them that the nation is less an objective entity, defined by geographical factors or by racial or linguistic homogeneity, than a subjective one. Drawing on the earlier insights of Ernest Renan, they saw the nation as a socially constructed formation, rooted in shared 4 Marcus Clarke, For the Term of His Natural Life, intro.

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