TEXT, THEORY, SPACE Text, Theory, Space is an unprecedented, landmark text in post-colonial criticism and theory. This outstanding and timely collection focuses on two white settler societies, South Africa and Australia, and explores the meaning of ‘The South’ as an aesthetic, political, geographical and cultural space. Arising from a conference sponsored by the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies and Sir Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, this collection draws on expansive disciplines, including literature, history, urban geography, politics and anthropology. Issues of claiming, naming and possessing land; national and personal boundaries; and questions of race, gender and nationalism are also explored. Kate Darian-Smith is a lecturer in Australian Studies and Deputy Director at Sir Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, University of London and is the author of On the Home Front and editor of History and Memory in Twentieth-Century Australia. Liz Gunner is a lecturer in African Literature at the School of Oriental and African Studies and is the editor of The Journal of Southern African Studies. Sarah Nuttall is a Research Fellow at the University of Cape Town and writes on South African literature. TEXT, THEORY, SPACE Land, literature and history in South Africa and Australia Edited by Kate Darian-Smith, Liz Gunner and Sarah Nuttall London and New York First published 1996 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an International Thomson Publishing company © 1996 Kate Darian-Smith, Liz Gunner and Sarah Nuttall All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced, or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-203-99252-0 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-415-12407-7 (Print Edition) ISBN 0-415-12408-5 (pbk) To our mothers, Pam, Pearl, and Jean CONTENTS Notes on contributors vii Acknowledgements x Introduction 1 Part I Defining the South 1 Turning the tables—or, grounding post-colonialism 23 Paul Carter 2 Comparative barbarism: game reserves, sugar 37 plantations, and the modernization of South African landscape David Bunn 3 The voyage south: writing immigration 53 Kerryn Goldsworthy 4 A ‘white-souled state’: across the ‘South’ with Lady 65 Barker Gillian Whitlock Part II Glaiming lands, creating identities, making nations 5 ‘Skirting the edges of civilization’: two Victorian 83 women travellers and ‘colonial spaces’ in South Africa Michelle Adler 6 ‘Rescuing’ Barbara Thompson and other white 99 women: captivity narratives on Australian frontiers Kate Darian-Smith 7 Names and the land: poetry of belonging and 115 unbelonging, a comparative approach Liz Gunner vi 8 Imagination, madness and nation in Australian 131 bush mythology Sue Rowley 9 Inscribing identity on the landscape: national 145 symbols in South Africa Nhlanhla Maake 10 ‘Great spaces washed with sun’: the Matopos and 155 Uluru compared Terence Ranger 11 ‘A land so inviting and still without inhabitants’: 171 erasing Koori culture from (post-) colonial landscapes Tony Birch Part III Borders, boundaries, open spaces 12 Martha has no land: the tragedy of identity in The 189 Marabi Dance Abner Nyamende 13 Spaces of the ‘Other’: planning for cultural diversity 201 in Western Sydney Sophie Watson 14 Flatness and fantasy: representations of the land in 215 two recent South African novels Sarah Nuttall 15 Drum magazine (1951–99) and the spatial 227 configurations of gender Dorothy Driver 16 Rural transnationalism: Bessie Head’s southern 239 spaces Rob Nixon Index 251 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Michelle Adler recently completed her PhD on South African women travel writers at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, and is Lecturer in the Department of English at Rand Afrikaans University in Johannesburg. She is interested in women’s writing of Empire, especially travel writing, and in African literature. Tony Birch is completing a PhD in History at The University of Melbourne, but much prefers writing and publishing poetry, and cultivating vegetable gardens. David Bunn is Professor in the Department of English at the University of the Western Cape. He has published on South African landscape and cultural studies, is a co-editor of the journal Social Dynamics and his book Land Acts: Modernity, Representation and the Making of South African Space is due out soon. Paul Carter is a writer and historian, and is currently Senior Research Fellow at The Australian Centre, The University of Melbourne. His recent books include Baroque Memories (1994), The Sound In-Between (1992) and Living in A New Country (1992). His new title The Lie of the Land (1996) is published by Faber. Kate Darian-Smith lectures in the Department of History and The Australian Centre at The University of Melbourne. Her publications include On the Home Front: Melbourne in Wartime 1939–1945 (1990), as editor, Captured Lives: Australian Captivity Narratives (1992), and, as co-editor, History and Memory in Twentieth-Century Australia (1994). Dorothy Driver has published widely on South African literature and is the editor of Pauline Smith (1983), in the McGraw-Hill case- book series. She has also compiled and introduced Nadine Gordimer: A Bibliography (1993). She is Associate Professor in the English viii Department at the University of Cape Town and is a leading critic on South African women writers. Kerryn Goldsworthy is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Melbourne University. Well-known in the field of Australian Studies and in literary journalism, she is the editor of two anthologies of Australian short stories, and edited the national reviews journal Australian Book Review in 1986–7. Her collection of short stories North of the Moonlight Sonata was published in 1989. She is currently working on a full-length study of nineteenth- century Australian women’s letters and diaries. Liz Gunner is Senior Lecturer in the Department of African Languages and Cultures at the School of Oriental and African Studies. She has published articles on South African oral poetry, and a few short stories. Her publications include, Musho! Zulu Popular Praises, translated and co-edited with Mafika Gwala (1994) and as editor, Politics and Performance in Southern African Theatre, Poetry and Song (1994). Nhlanhla Maake was Lecturer in Southern African Drama and Literature at the School of African and Oriental Studies until 1995 when he moved to the University of the Witwatersrand as Professor of African Languages. He has been an actor, has written articles on Sotho literature and South African theatre and language studies and is a prolific and successful novelist, writing in Sotho. Rob Nixon is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He has written articles on contemporary South African politics and culture in journals such as Transition and The Village Voice and is the author of London Calling: V.S. Naipaul, Postcolonial Mandarin (1992) and Homelands, Harlem and Hollywood: South African Culture and the World Beyond (1994). He is currently writing a book on ostriches and ostrich farming in South Africa and North America. Sarah Nuttall has recently completed her doctorate at Oxford University on reading practices amongst South African women and is Research Fellow in English at the University of Cape Town. She is currently working on a comparative study of South African and Australian fiction. Abner Nyamende is Lecturer in African Literature at the University of Cape Town. His interests are in oral literature and literature written in indigenous South African languages, particularly Xhosa. He is currently working on a doctorate on the novelist Modikwe Dikobe. ix Terence Ranger is Rhodes Professor of Race Relations at Oxford University. He has published numerous books and articles on African and particularly southern African history. His writings include The Invention of Tradition, co-edited with Eric Hobsbawm (1983), Peasant Consciousness and Guerilla War (1985), Legitimacy and the State in Twentieth-Century Africa, co-edited with Olufemi Vaughan, and Dance and Society in Eastern Africa 1890–1970. Sue Rowley is Professor of Contemporary Australian Art History at The University of New South Wales College of Fine Arts. Her recent publications have included, as co-editor, the book Debutante Nation: Feminism Contests the 1890s (1993), and she also writes on craft theory and feminism in the visual arts. Sophie Watson is Professor at the School of Policy Studies, University of Bristol. Her recent publications include, as editor, Playing the State: Australian Feminist Interventions (1990), and as co-editor, Metropolis Now: Planning and the Urban in Contemporary Australia (1994) and Post- Modern Cities and Spaces (1995) Gillian Whitlock is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Humanities at Griffith University. Recently she co-edited the journal Australian Canadian Studies and the books Australian and Canadian Literatures in English: Comparative Perspectives, and Re- Siting Queen’s English, among others. She has just completed editing a collection of contemporary Australian autobiographical writing, entitled Autographs, and is working on a study of post-colonial autobiography. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book arose from a conference, ‘Southern Spaces: Land, Representation and Identity in South African and Australian Literatures’ organized by the School of African and Oriental Studies, and the Sir Robert Menzies Centre for Australian Studies at London University.