The Drover's Wife Speaks

The Drover’s Wife Speaks: A Literary and Cultural History of Maternal Citizenship in Australia, 1890–2020 Caitlin Still Department of English Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences The University of Sydney A thesis submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, awarded in 2020 1 Statement of Originality This is to certify that, to the best of my knowledge, the content of this thesis is my own work. This thesis has not been submitted for any degree or other purposes. I certify that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work and that all the assistance received in preparing this thesis and sources have been acknowledged. Quotations have been reproduced with Australian spellings. 2 Contents Front Matter ............................................................................................................................. 2 Acknowledgements .............................................................................................................................. 4 Abstract ............................................................................................................................................ 5 Introduction: The Mother as Wife ........................................................................................... 7 Chapter 1 Bush Man, Bush Mum: Henry Lawson and Mary Gilmore..................................................... 34 Chapter 2 The Good Modern Mother?: Eleanor Dark’s Prelude to Christopher and Ruth Park’s Harp in the South novels ....................................................................................................................... 79 Chapter 3 Mothers and Lovers: Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip and Ruby Langford Ginibi’s Don’t Take Your Love to Town ................................................................................................................. 122 Chapter 4 Abject Relations: Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap and Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook .............. 164 Conclusion: Decolonising the Drover’s Wife ....................................................................... 208 Bibliography ........................................................................................................................ 214 3 Acknowledgements My emphatic thanks go firstly to Associate Professor Peter Kirkpatrick, whose mentorship both in research and teaching has been such a privilege. The breadth of his knowledge of Australian textuality and cultural history have been indispensable in the evolution of this thesis, as have his insight and observant reading at every stage in its development. I will remain grateful throughout my career for Peter’s careful and discerning guidance in my development as a scholar. I would also like to thank Associate Professor Ruth Barcan for her helpful suggestions and recommendations. Thanks also go to the University of Sydney Department of English, for providing me with the opportunity to learn from fellow scholars at fortnightly departmental seminars. I am grateful for the department’s facilitation of my first teaching experiences: particular thanks for this go again to Peter, and to Associate Professor Brigid Rooney. My postgraduate colleagues have been an invaluable source of support and solidarity during the years of my candidature. Thanks go particularly to Benedetto Passaretti and Lauren Weber. Additional thanks for supportive proofreading and longstanding friendship go to Louise Carey-White. To Chloe Coulthard, for her sisterhood, and for her thoughts on feminist mothering. To Zoe Gallagher-Avery, for the similarly enlightening discussions, and the proofreading. Thanks for the same go to my sister Edwina Still. And to Hamish McDonald, my downstairs neighbour: I cannot imagine my candidature without the company, the countless meals cooked for me, the prattle, and the banter. My work has been informed by an oft-reprised conversation on Monkey Grip and The Harp in the South. Finally, and so importantly, I thank my parents. It is hard to imagine being in my present occupation without their influence of their devotion to ideas and love for reading, which they have shared with me from my earliest years. To my father, Michael Still, for his endless encouragement and unwavering faith in me. And finally, to my fierce and constant mother, Maria McCrossin—and not just for the critical eyes you’ve brought so many times to my work. It all started with you. 4 Abstract This thesis interrogates the specific construction of the maternal citizen in Australia. While the patriarchal construction of motherhood is not an Australian phenomenon, the maternal has in a settler-colonial context been inextricable from nation-building projects. Through the study of a selection of Australian texts, published from the 1890s to the decade just past, demonstrated is how Australian women’s citizenship has been constructed in relation to their maternality—actual, potential, or presumed. Apparent, moreover, is the mutual implication of maternality and citizenship which has underpinned the regulation of all Australian women, with different consequences contingent on the desirability of varying maternalities according to the dominant culture. Where “good” motherhood has been attainable, it has been regulated in such a way as to uphold dominant national interests, including the perpetuation of colonialism. The representations I consider represent the maternal as a site both of hegemony and resistance. Argued, therefore, is that Australian women have across divisions of race and class been regulated by the dominant construct of maternal citizenship against their own interests, albeit with varying consequences. Explored, however, is the potential for an autonomous maternal citizenship to challenge the oppressive structures structuring the nation. Accordingly traced is the maternal citizen’s emergence as literary subject, in response to her objectification by dominant national narratives. 5 The girl flushed and leaned forward. She put out both hands to me, palms up, and whispered, “But she was – a mother.” I had no reply. I was troubled, and I still am, by the finality of the word “mother”, this great thundering archetype with the power to stop the intellect in its tracks.1 1 Helen Garner, “Why She Broke: The Woman, Her Children and the Lake,” The Monthly, no. June (2017). 6 Introduction The Mother as Wife “No use frettin’”, says the Drover’s Wife.2 These are the only words she speaks that do not respond to her children. In this moment she speaks to herself, as she considers her husband’s long absences. The hardships of the mythologised “Bush Mum” are presented as inevitable, as facts of frontier life on the brink of a nation’s birth. And to this coming nation, she is unquestioning of her responsibilities.3 Reflected here is Lawson’s reputation as the “father of the Australian tradition”.4 No woman is accordingly credited as its mother. This is perhaps the role occupied by the fictive Drover’s Wife, instrumentalised for her husband, her children, and for the nation soon to be. She is powerless to respond but with the words Lawson chooses for her. There is an earlier Drover’s Wife, however, written by the mother of our cultural father figure. In articulating the oppression of “The Australian Bush-Woman”, a wife and a mother, Louisa Lawson is uncompromising. There are many commonalities between Louisa’s essay and Henry’s respective bush mothers. To this thesis, however, the most important of them is this: “Of her own life she never speaks”.5 Federation signalled Australia’s establishment as “a nation for a continent”, 6 in place of six settler colonies “owing their allegiance directly to Britain”.7 Through the fiction of terra nullius, these displaced the hundreds of Indigenous nations which had existed on the continent since time immemorial. Exposing “Australia” as a construct is the fact that no name was ever given to the continent by its First Peoples. A settler-colonial state, the nation is grounded in ideology, and the violence it predicates. “The pursuit of the goal of White 2 Henry Lawson, “The Drover’s Wife (1892),” in While the Billy Boils, ed. Paul Eggert (Sydney: Sydney University Press, 2013), 65. 3 For further discussion on the troping of the Bush Mum, see Kay Schaffer, “The Bush and Women,” in Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 52-73. 4 Kay Schaffer, Women and the Bush: Forces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition (Melbourne: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 34. 5 Louisa Lawson, “The Australian Bush-Woman,” Australian Literary Studies 10, no. 4 (1982): 501. 6 Edmund Barton, cited in Robert Dixon, “‘A Nation for a Continent’: Australian Literature and the Cartographic Imaginary of the Federation Era,” Antipodes 28, no. 1 (2014): 141. 7 Richard White, Inventing Australia: Images and Identity 1788–1980, Australian Experience, (Sydney: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), 63. 7 Australia”, writes Patricia Grimshaw, is “the founding principle of our nationality”.8 . Federation gave meaning to the words “Australian citizen”, and Australian citizenship is at least as constructed as the Australian state. This is evidenced, for example, by the fact that before 1962, citizenship for the continent’s Indigenous peoples was conditional upon renunciation of culture.9 As Joan Eveline writes, such conditions upon citizenship suggest the “highly political and unstable nature of “the citizen”.10 Colonialism has dictated that the ideal

Load more