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Littoral Fictions: Writing Tasmania and Newfoundland

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Littoral Fictions: Writing Tasmania and Newfoundland LITTORAL FICTIONS: WRITING TASMANIA AND NEWFOUNDLAND by Fiona Margaret Polack B.A. (Hons) Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy University of Tasmania July,2002 r:::_ --~ t-- ;_~ l..__ I ~ c.- '-V'-"-...-a....-QA..:,. '""- ,.,.-") - L c G:: l ~->- - C'· f'-t ....o...------ .c'. ~- t /... .__ ,,.6 c_.."" This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for a degree or diploma by the University of Tasmania or any other institution, except by way of background information which is duly acknowledged in the thesis, and to the best of my knowledge and belief no material previously published or written by another person except where due acknowledgement is made in the text of the thesis. Fiona Polack This thesis may be made available for loan and limited copying in accordance with the Copyright Act 1968. Fiona Polack PhD Abstract: Littoral Fictions: Writing Tasmania and Newfoundland This thesis examines contemporary literary fiction which takes either the Canadian island of Newfoundland or the Australian island of Tasmania as its imaginative terrain. Utilising a comparative framework, it juxtaposes narratives which have helped construct these regional spaces during the last twenty-five years of the twentieth century. Informed by post-modern spatial theory, 'Littoral Fictions' is premised on the argument that places are produced, rather than simply reflected, in literary and other modes of cultural expression. Particularly important to the thesis are Michel de Certeau's assertion that 'every story is a travel story - a spatial practice' (The Practice of Everyday Life 115), and Fredric Jameson's contention that cultural and economic production are inextricably intertwined. Consequently, the thesis seeks to determine how and why Tasmania and Newfoundland figure within recent fiction, and to consider the ramifications of their constructions. 'Littoral Fictions' examines writing about leaving, walking around, and coming home to regional spaces. In the process, it addresses the work of Christopher Koch, Dennis Altman, Paul Bowdring, Wayne Johnston, Patrick Kavanagh, Robert Drewe, Mudrooroo, Bernice Morgan, Richard Flanagan and E. Annie Proulx, in particular detail. The thesis finds that Newfoundland and Tasmania play comparable, instigative roles within narratives hinging on the alternate spatial trajectories it identifies. Only rarely do these islands serve as sketchy or neutral backgrounds. Instead, their landscapes and histories are presented in detail, and important shifts in narrative action are associated with movements to, from, or within their boundaries. Paradoxically, the more insistently the islands are evoked as geographically, culturally and/or economically marginal, the more significant their role in the narrative - even to the point of their serving as representative spaces within national imaginaries. Literary constructions of Tasmania and Newfoundland diverge and converge in more specific ways, too. Stories about leaving the two islands are quite different, for instance, whilst the resemblance between narratives of homecoming is remarkable . .'Littoral Fictions' does identify signs of a shift in the ways Tasmania and Newfoundland are spatialised in some recent writing. The thesis concludes by speculating that moves to figure the islands as more fully integrated with the world beyond their shores portend an important re-conceptualisation. In identifying parallels in typical figurations of Tasmania and Newfoundland, 'Littoral Fictions' seeks to participate in the project of constructing new connections between the respective islands and places elsewhere. Acknowledgements I commenced this dissertation soon after corning horne to Tasmania, explored both Tasmania and Newfoundland during its writing, and completed it as I prepared to move to Atlantic Canada. People on both sides of the world deserve my thanks. At the University of Tasmania, Lucy Frost has been an unstintingly generous and supportive supervisor; Ian Buchanan has offered expert guidance on critical theory; and Jennifer Livett helped me find my feet as a post-graduate. Also on the south-side of the world, Angela Rockel, Naomi Cameron, Andrea Collis, Yvette Blackwood, Liz McMahon, Martin Ball, Sharon Bessell and Hayden Jones have been wonderful interlocuters and stellar friends. My thanks to the Association for Canadian Studies in Australia and New Zealand, and the University of Tasmania, for funding essential research trips to Newfoundland. At Memorial University, Ron Rornpkey, Pat Byrne, Larry Matthews, Philip Hiscock, and the staff of the Centre for Newfoundland Studies were especially helpful. Terry Goldie, of York University, became a fabulous correspondent after a chance meeting in St. John's. The hospitality and friendship of Danine Farquharson, Jamie Fitzpatrick and Susan Drodge made visits to Newfoundland a joy. In Halifax, Kay and Gordon Mack confirmed the fabled kindness and generosity of Maritirners. I am boundlessly grateful to Rob Finley, for his love, and his help in building all kinds of bridges to cross the sea between our far-flung places. This thesis is dedicated to my family- first and foremost my parents, Mary and Alan Polack - for reasons too numerous to tell. Table of Contents Prelude 1 Introduction: On the Littoral 5 1 Contemporary Itineraries 6 2 Territories of Fiction 22 Part 1: Leaving 36 Introductory 37 3 Island Escapes 45 4 Staging Homecoming 87 Part 2: Walking Around 124 Introductory 125 5 Traversing the Old Lost Land 136 6 Walking Races 171 Part 3: Coming Home 201 Introductory 202 7 Taking the Waters 210 8 Home Births 247 Conclusion: Going Nowhere/Being Everywhere 282 Bibliography 295 List of Abbreviations 335 Prelude UTAS Prelude Whispers from the Beach: Voices from the beach are hard to hear. The wind snatches them from lips. They are lost in the white noise of the waves. Vast spaces are high­ country, Grand Canyon, grave silent. But a circumlittoralist hears with her eyes, listens in her colours. Lines whisper. Shapes moan. (Dening, Terra Spiritus 8) Each turn of the tide confirms that the littoral is the most tenuous of borders. As Greg Dening's meditation on spaces by the sea highlights, coasts invite figuration as turbulent arenas of flux and change. Yet islands, rimmed entirely by the littoral, are rarely constructed as possessing shifting boundaries. Instead of constituting 'territories of translation' (New, Borderlands 5), their coasts are more typically conceived as definite borders between one kind of space and another. Edged so indelibly, they fulfil the kind of longing David Malouf describes as unsatisfied when crossing between New South Wales and Queensland: a desire that 'somewhere, on the far side of what I knew, difference began, and [... ] the point could be clearly recognised' (12 Edmondstone Street 127). Canadian critic W. H. New claims that boundaries seem 'to be metaphors more than fixed edges: signs of limits more than the limits themselves' (Borderlands 4). This observation by no means trivialises the significance of 2 the way we place borders, for as New further argues 'we are in daily contact with metaphors. They shape how we conceptualize the world' (5). This thesis identifies 'boundary rhetorics' (5) deployed in contemporary literary fiction about Newfoundland and Tasmania, and asks: How are they created through narrative? What inspires them? What ramifications do they have? How and why do they so frequently isolate these places as distinct and unique zones? How are they crossed and re-crossed? The littoral is the thesis's own implicit guiding boundary metaphor. In the face of stringently circumscribed conceptions of Tasmania and Newfoundland the image signals that these territories can always be seen in more fluid ways. Thinking 'litorally' prompts recognition, for instance, that the political territories of Tasmania and Newfoundland are not coterminous with the geographical limits of their mainlands. Tasmania encompasses close to 350 islands, and Newfoundland, in addition to similarly including a myriad water-bounded tracts of land, is also linked with Labrador. As Epeli Hau'ofa so convincingly testifies when here- envisages the Pacific Islands as 'a sea of islands' rather than 'islands in a far sea' (7) inclusive, rather than exclusive, figurations of islands can be powerfully enabling.' 'Because the smaller islands off the mainlands of Newfoundland and Tasmania have historically been the dwelling places of those marginalised within their cultures- re-associating them with the mainlands is a salutary reminder of the differences which bisect the more monolithic conceptions of Tasmania and Newfoundland. In Tasmania, indigenous people were relocated to Flinders Island in Bass Strait, and convicts to small islands like Maria, in the east, and Sarah, in the west. In Newfoundland, prior to the programs of re-settlement, impoverished fishing communities existed in settlements off the main shore. 3 The image of the littoral is pertinent to figurations of all kinds of boundaries -not only those delineating island-ness. Contemporary fiction draws many different lines to encompass Tasmania and Newfoundland- lines on real and imagined maps, lines of argument, time-lines - the littoral reminds us that these demarcations are rarely as unwaveringly constant as they might sometimes seem. Voices on the beach may be hard to hear but they never cease their whispering. ' i: ------· ----- -- r1 -- ---- · ---- - -- ---- - --- -~- - -- - ---- - - - -------------- --
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