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Department of Communication and Cultural Studies “Cruel Capes”: a Novel; and the Nexus Between Fact and Imagination: a Discourse of the Historical Fiction Genre in Contemporary Novels: an Exegesis Marcia van Zeller This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Curtin University April 2014 i Declaration To the best of my knowledge and belief this thesis contains no material previously published by any other person except where due acknowledgement has been made. This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university. Signature: Date: 23 April 2014 ii iii Abstract In 1876, at Redgate Beach off the south-west coast of Western Australia, 16- year-old Grace Bussell and Aboriginal stockman Sam Isaacs are said to have ridden horses into pounding surf to rescue 50 passengers from the stranded Georgette steamship. Grace and Sam were hailed as heroes, even though some survivor accounts credited this rescue to the ship’s crew. To this day the riders’ celebrity has eclipsed the actions of several unsung heroes, crew and passengers who committed an astonishing act of bravery in this maritime tragedy. Whatever transpired at Redgate Beach, the absolute truth can never be known. Such is my quandary in writing an historical novel (the creative component of my thesis), an account of the shipwreck based on extensive research and, as far as I am aware, the first long format narrative about the incident. As I negotiate the divide between fact and imagination, my approach is informed by the process of writing the exegetical component, comprising an analysis of literary and historiographical discourse on the disarticulation between fact and fiction in historical novels. The exegesis also informs the writing of the novel by exploring the creative and ethical approaches of historical novelists from Canada and Australia. These nations are prolific sources of acclaimed, revisionist historical fiction that challenges Eurocentric retellings of their respective histories. iv v Table of Contents Acknowledgements vii Introduction 1 Component 1: Creative Production 5 Component 2: Exegesis 202 1.0 Background of the Georgette Shipwreck 203 2.0 Research Question, Objectives and Methodology 210 2.1 The Research-Question Model 210 2.2 Objectives and Methodology 211 2.2.1 Objective 1 211 2.2.2 Objective 2 212 2.2.3 Objective 3 212 2.2.4 Objective 4 213 2.2.5 Objective 5 213 3.0 Literature Review of Historiographic Theory 214 3.1 R.G. Collingwood, Re-Enactment and the Historical Imagination 215 3.2 Hayden White: Metahistory 219 3.3 Linda Hutcheon: Historiographic Metafiction 222 4.0 Australian and Canadian Authors Renegotiating Their Nations’ Histories 227 4.1 Australia and Canada: A brief comparison of key historical influences and events 227 4.2 History debates in Australia and Canada – 1960s to the present 233 4.3 Richard Flanagan’s Wanting 236 4.4 Kate Grenville’s The Secret River 242 4.5 Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace 248 4.6 Guy Vanderhaege’s The Englishman’s Boy 253 5.0 Historical Research into the Wreck of the Georgette 258 5.1 Bibliographic research 259 5.2 Personal interviews 263 vi 5.3 Field and experiential research 266 6.0 Reflexive Practice 270 6.1 Representation of events in the novel 270 6.2 Representation of characters in the novel 280 7.0 Conclusions 284 Works Cited 287 Bibliography 293 vii Acknowledgements When I first enrolled in this PhD program, I was anticipating a long, arduous road ahead. What I did not expect was to find the road so exciting and enjoyable. Negotiating the process of completing the thesis – a blend of historical and theoretical research and creative production – has been immensely rewarding. In these acknowledgements I would like to thank, first and foremost, my two PhD supervisors, Dr Deborah Hunn and Professor Graham Seal, for their constructive guidance, support and inspiration at every milestone in that long road. Importantly, I would like to express my gratitude to Curtin University’s Faculty of Humanities, Department of Communication and Cultural Studies for accepting my initial proposal and providing invaluable support for research and conference attendance. Researching a story about an eighteenth century steamship has introduced me to the world of maritime heritage and a group of enthusiasts whose passion for ships and all things nautical is matched by their encyclopaedic knowledge. The Maritime Heritage Association of Western Australia, particularly maritime artist/historian Ross Shardlow, have been generous with their advice and patient in helping me to understand the difference between a foc’sle and a fid. Dr Michael ‘Mac’ McCarthy, maritime archeologist at the Western Australian Maritime Museum gets a big vote of thanks for sharing invaluable information and referring me to the Maritime Heritage folk. Thanks also to South Australian Maritime Museum for allowing me to inspect the MV Nelcebee in drydock at Port Adelaide, and the Sydney Heritage Fleet for inviting me aboard the S.S.Waratah during a wintry day’s cruise across Sydney Harbour. Finally, I would like to thank close friends and family members for their encouragement over these past several years: the van Zellers – Luke, Claudia and Penny, for supporting me over the course of this time-intensive project; Dr David Ralph for his empathy (as one who’s been there before); my sister and brother-in-law – Jo and Andrew, for hosting my Canadian summer writing retreats; and Belle, their Newfoundlander, for keeping a vigil under the desk in her sprawling Newfie way. viii 1 Introduction Months before his death in 1986, the French existentialist writer Jean Genet was writing a manuscript that would ultimately be published posthumously under the title, Prisoner of Love – a memoir about his experiences in Palestinian refugee camps a decade earlier. Striving to understand the elusive complexities of the Palestinian revolution, he found that the women – the wives who stayed behind in the camps while their husbands went off to fight Israeli forces – were under-recognised for their stabilising effect on the dislocated families living in the camps, and for their stoic resignation to raising male children “to die at twenty not in the Holy Land, but for it” (Genet 5). The tacit courage of civilians enmeshed in conflict tends to be overshadowed by the documented, often hyperbolised deeds of warriors. In Prisoner of Love Genet observed: “The fame of heroes owes little to the extent of their conquests and all to the success of the tributes paid to them” (5). His statement is an epigraph to my historical novel, “Cruel Capes” – the creative component of this PhD thesis. Genet’s words resonate with the problem encountered when finding blanks, inconsistencies and anomalies in the historical records surrounding the Georgette shipwreck, the subject of “Cruel Capes”. A critical study of the available evidence has exposed the fabrication, by journalists and raconteurs, bystanders and hearsay witnesses, of heroic acts on the part of a privileged young girl on horseback and her ‘half-caste servant’. I postulate that the enduring legend of Grace Bussell, allegedly the saviour of passengers and crew stranded on the deck of the doomed S.S. Georgette on 1 December 1876, was largely created on the pages of newspapers, on artists’ canvases, and on the engraved surfaces of medals and commemorative plaques. However, in dismantling this myth in the course of writing the novel – emboldened by some compelling and plausible evidence in some areas, but constrained by the absence of evidence in others – I have encountered the epistemological problem of how to best apply inference and imagination to fill gaps in factual information. The problem is also an ethical one, since the conclusions that I have drawn have the potential 2 to falsely undermine or aggrandise the reputations and characters of prominent figures from the past. The string of slim volumes published about the Georgette rescue continues to grow. These narratives tend to perpetuate the tale of a young girl repeatedly riding her horse into wild surf, her faithful but subordinate native helper Sam Isaacs at her side, to bring passengers to the safety of the beach. To date, it appears that no long format narrative for an adult readership has been written about this incident. I have taken up the challenge of writing this novel about the Georgette as the creative production component of this PhD thesis. The exegesis, which forms the theoretical component, completes the thesis. Both parts set out to address the central research question: “How can a writer of historical fiction ethically negotiate the divide between fact and imagination?” As part of my research methodology, I have compared four works of revisionist historical fiction by Australian and Canadian writers from the last three decades – works that question the historical record rather than perpetuate the traditional narratives of their respective national histories. The various modi operandi of these authors have helped to inform my own approach as I have negotiated the challenges of adjudicating between differing versions of events, incorporating factual historical material into a fictional work and filling information gaps with invention. I have compared the histories of both countries and identified close ethnogeographical parallels between the two, as well as similar social, cultural and political paradigms that have shaped Canadians’ and Australians’ attitudes toward national identity and the writing of history. Those similarities, I propose, have influenced a wave of contemporary historical novelists who, in the words of Herb Wyile, “have exposed, and pushed beyond the barriers of class, gender, race and ethnicity that ‘official’ history both constructs and naturalizes” (Wyile, Speculative Fictions iv). In researching the story of the Georgette shipwreck, I have encountered many barriers to truth that could be attributable to such biases that Wylie mentions.