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Notes
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Contents indexed selectively.
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Editor's note: Refereed Proceedings of the Tropics of the Imagination Conference, 4-5 July 2013, The Cairns Institute, James Cook University.
Contents
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Jean Devanny’s Fictional Critique of Whiteness and Race Relations in North Queensland,
single work
(p. 1-20)'Devanny was a largely forgotten and disregarded figure in Australian political and literary history by the 1960s, but the newly revitalised feminist, race-conscious and postcolonial analyses of the 1970s allowed her work a new relevance. Devanny’s first novels were written in Wellington in the 1920s, and some feature Maori men in relationships with white women. Her Queensland novels begin when she visited the North engaged in political support for the Weil’s disease strike, out of which came Sugar Heaven (1936), and then Paradise Flow (1938)—both of which show white women choosing Migrant men (Italian and Jugoslav) over their white husbands—and after that, a planned cane industry trilogy, of which only the first volume, Cindie (1949), in which the white lady of the house has sex with a South Sea Islander indentured worker, would be published. The (also unpublished) “The Pearlers” offers a depiction of a white patriarch in simultaneous relationships with white and Indigenous women on Thursday Island, where she spent some time in 1948. Devanny moved to Townsville in 1950 to live; she published very little after that, although the already written Travels in North Queensland came out in 1951. The paper will consider how far Devanny can be viewed as working with an early style of 1990s “whiteness theory”, and also how, in this regard, one might think about her depiction (often scanty) of Indigenous characters in her north Queensland fictions.' (Publication abstract)
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Star Making : A Publishing History of Thea Astley,
single work
criticism
(p. 21-29)'This article focuses directly on Thea Astley’s publishing history from the time of her involvement with Brisbane’s avant garde in the 1950s, her early inclusion in regional collections, and her emergence as a Miles Franklin prize-winning author, through the enabling pen and advocacy of one of Angus & Robertson (A&R)’s finest fiction editors, Beatrice Davis, to the establishment in the 1980s of Astley’s ultimate author-publisher relationship with Penguin Books and her own overseas literary agent. It will also examine the publishing trajectory of selected novels released and re-issued by the University of Queensland Press (UQP) and Penguin Books, and revisit the divides between writer and editor, publisher and publicist, and the dis/enabling inspiration of difference in the tropics, in the context of the gendered histories of publishing at A&R, Penguin Books and UQP. ' (Publication abstract)
- Paronella Park : Music, Migration and the ‘Tropical Exotic’, single work criticism (p. 197-209)
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Literature of the Pacific, Mainly Australian,
single work
criticism
(p. 210-219)
This lecture is in some ways the ‘lost’ chapter of The Cambridge History of Australian Literature (2009), one eventually not written because the projected author could find not enough literary material even in that vast Pacific Ocean, or perhaps found – as mariners have – only far separated specks in that ocean. Yet Australian literature about the nation’s Pacific littoral and the islands within the ocean and the ocean itself is varied, considerable, and often eccentric. Our greatest drinking song is Barry Humphries’s ‘The Old Pacific Sea’. The Japs and the jungle are the hallmarks of fiction, poetry and reportage of the Pacific War of 1942-5. New Guinea has attracted such writers as James McAuley, Peter Ryan, Trevor Shearston, Randolph Stow and Drusilla Modjeska. The short stories of Louis Becke are the most extensive and iconoclastic writing about the Pacific by any Australian. Yet the literature of the Pacific littoral seems thinner than that of the Indian Ocean. The map on the title page of Rolf Boldrewood’s A Modern Buccaneer (1894) shows those afore-mentioned specks in a vast expanse of water. What aesthetic challenges have Pacific writing posed and how have they been met? Have the waters of the Pacific satisfied Australians as a near offshore playground but defeated wider efforts of the imagination? ' (Publication summary)
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The Literary Transformation of Memory Across Generations,
single work
criticism
(p. 230-238)
'Artistic and cultural representations of space, place, memory, and belonging are some of the fundamental aspects of fictional narratives. This paper focuses on how the tropics evolve as a place of belonging in Terri Janke’s Butterfly song through literary transformation of generational memories of personal and family experiences combined with historical fact. The notion of the tropics as ‘different’ is examined through complex relationships between the place where the protagonist, Tarena Shaw, lives in Sydney;
the place that she calls home, Cairns; and the place of her ancestors, Thursday Island in the Torres Straits. Layers of memory unfold through family stories revisited in the context of contemporary cultural life to ensure the return of a pearl brooch lost for nearly forty years. Components of culture, a love story, a connection of things to ancestors and people, and the history of the Torres Straits and Cairns are the foci of Janke’s novel. These features demonstrate how multiple perspectives of place and memory can
enrich the literary imagination and in turn, enlighten Australian readers to the historical past and present life of tropical North Queensland. ' (Publication abstact)
- A Teacher, a Totem, and a True Tropical Story : A Reading, single work extract (p. 239-245)
