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Lights and Shadows in Australian Historical Fiction: How Does Historical Fiction Deal with How Australia Comes to Know Its Past?

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Lights and Shadows in Australian Historical Fiction: How Does Historical Fiction Deal with How Australia Comes to Know Its Past? Lights and shadows in Australian historical fiction: how does historical fiction deal with how Australia comes to know its past? (Dissertation and creative work) Jenny Sinclair Submitted in total fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. Faculty of Arts School of Culture and Communication December, 2019 ORCID: 0000-0001-9773-6636 DECLARATION: This thesis is the original work of the author towards the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, Faculty of Arts, School of Culture and Communication Due acknowledgement has been made in the text of all material used; and the thesis is fewer than the maximum word limit in length, exclusive of images. 1 TABLE OF CONTENTS: ABSTRACT….……………………………………………………………………………………..……….4 THESIS INTRODUCTION:………………….………………………….…………………………………5 SECTION ONE: CRITICAL ESSAY.......................................................................................... ................ 9 Section introduction……………………………………………………………………………………..9 Chapter One: Overview and definitions…………………….………………………………………12 1.1 Overview of works under discussion .............................................................................................. 12 1.2 Defining the historical fiction under consideration …………………………………………….....15 1.3 Historical fiction’s position with regard to historiography………………………………………..18 1.4 Historical context for the works examined in this thesis: the Australian “frontier” and the history wars ……………………………………………………………………………………………………24 1.5: Criticisms of historical fiction: Inga Clendinnen………….…………..……………………....….27 1.6: Historical fiction’s defences…………………………………………....…………………………28 Chapter Two: Kim Scott’s Benang and That Deadman Dance: writing back to the archives and the problems of writing ………………….…………………………………………………………..30 2.1: Kim Scott: Benang and the archives…………………………….……………………………......30 2.2: That Deadman Dance and writing about “reality”……………………………………………….38 Chapter Three: Kate Grenville and other writers of Australian historical fiction ….................. 46 3.1: Kate Grenville: sympathy for the past and historical empathy……………….…………………..47 3.2: “Raiding the archives” Grenville, Ross Gibson and the archives……………….………………..53 Chapter Four: Historical fiction’s possibilities: why form matters, an investigation of fictional subjectivity and of fiction writers’ claims to “truth”………………………………………………57 4.1: “The full arsenal of fiction”: form, and subjectivity rendered via place, voice and focalisation ...58 4.2: The “truth” of fiction……………………………………………………………………………...64 Section One conclusion: …………………………………………………………………………......68 SECTION TWO: REFLECTIVE ESSAY ................................................................................................. 68 Section introduction:………………………………………………………………………………....69 Chapter One: A life of Edward Oxford: what I know: ……………………………………………72 Chapter Two: Researching Edward Oxford: how I know what I know: ………………………...89 2.1: Fiction writers and the archives…………………………….………………………………….….90 2.2: Early research and online resources……………………………………..………………………………..95 2.3: Further research and physical archives…………………………………………………………………..99 2.4: Site visits and writing fiction set in historical place…….………...………………………………….103 2.5: Background and secondary sources………………………………….………………………………….107 2 Chapter Three: Writing Edward Oxford:…… ………….……………………………………….110 3.1: Biographical historical fiction …………………………………………………………………………..111 3.2: Developing themes……………………………………...…………………………………………………114 3.3: Practical choices. ………………………………………….………………………………………………116 Section Two conclusion: ………………………………….……………………………………….. 121 SECTION THREE: EXTRACT FROM THE NOVEL LIGHTS AND SHADOWS OF MELBOURNE LIFE ............................................................................................................................................................. 122 Bibliography….…………………………………………………………………………………………...188 Image list: ……………………………………………………………………….……………………….. 202 3 ABSTRACT This thesis examines how recent Australian historical fiction, particularly that of Kim Scott and Kate Grenville, re-imagines and reframes Australia’s past and how it offers new ways of relating to that past. It does so with an emphasis on the perceived disconnect between what is available to archive-based academic historiography and the current understanding of the historical issues most relevant to modern Australians. It is presented in three sections. The first section focuses particularly on how fiction writers address the historical archives, with examples drawn mainly from works about the early frontier between Indigenous and settler Australians. It examines how different fiction styles and techniques address the construction of history, particularly the contrast between traditional realist narrative fiction and more postmodern techniques, with reference to parallel movements in the writing of non-fiction history. It asks how the concept of the “truth” about the past is dealt with differently in historical fiction, compared to historiography. This section concludes that historical fiction, particularly fiction that uses less traditional forms offers culturally useful ways of addressing modern questions about the past, and relationships with the past. The second section of the thesis is an extended examination of the process of creating a work of research fiction based on historical material. It begins with a short historical account of the subject of the author’s research, and goes on to offer a detailed examination of the research process. It considers in more depth the issue of archival research as it relates to the creation of stories in the past. The original research for this thesis was carried out both online and in physical archives, and the second section discusses how the archival research process influenced the fictional work in terms of both form and content. The second section also discusses how the works and techniques examined in the first section influenced the creation of the research fiction, with additional discussion of the genre of fictional historical biography. The final part of the thesis is a creative work in the form of an extended extract from a historical novel, based on the life of the 19th century historical figure Edward Oxford. The novel, titled Lights and Shadows of Melbourne Life, is a first-person narrative that incorporates both real and fictional archival material. It interrogates questions of memory, identity, colonial attitudes to migration to Australia, and through its inclusion of archives and “archives”, contrasted with the narrator’s commentary, deals with questions of archival reliability. 4 THESIS INTRODUCTION This thesis examines historical fiction in Australia. It asks: how has recent historical fiction dealt with the past and with how we come to know it? What stated aims, methods, values and ethical frameworks have contemporary fiction writers brought to bear on Australian history and historiography? How have they dealt with the archives? What literary techniques have they employed? The thesis is presented in three parts. The first is a critical essay where I present my main analyses and arguments around the above research questions. The second is a reflective essay in which I give an account of the historical knowledge gained in my own historical research, along with a critical reflection on the process of fictionalising the material. Finally, an extract from an historical novel (Lights and Shadows of Melbourne Life), written in light of my critical investigations, from original historical research. Throughout the thesis, I assume that my readership – the “we” and “our” I refer to – includes Australians of all backgrounds, including Indigenous, settler and recent immigrant, but I remain conscious of the differing perspectives of these groups. Section one, the critical essay, focuses on fiction written about contact between Indigenous society and settler/invader groups at or around the time of colonisation; this focus has been guided by the prevailing subject matter of leading Australian writers of historical fiction, most notably Kim Scott, Kate Grenville, Richard Flanagan, Alexis Wright, and Rohan Wilson. I will argue through close analysis, particularly of Scott’s work in Benang: from the heart and That Deadman Dance, that historical fiction, by virtue of the liberties and techniques available to fiction, offers insights and ways of thinking about history, and how we live with it in the present, that are unique to fiction. In this analysis I will examine how Scott’s historical fiction interacts and uses with the archival material that is more usually employed by historiography. I will follow the analysis of Scott with a wider examination of how fiction writers have dealt with the Australian “frontier” and what the use of literary techniques in their writing contributes to the discussion of the frontier as it is understood today. My examination will first focus on Kate Grenville’s The Secret River and The Lieutenant, followed by an examination of how various fictional techniques, when applied to history, work to produce new ways of understanding. The question of how fiction writers use historical archives is investigated in both the critical and the reflective essays: in the first case with reference to published works and in the second with reference to my production of a manuscript based on my own research for this thesis. The discussion will also address how fiction
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