AustLit logo

AustLit

Marise Williams Marise Williams i(A138656 works by)
Gender: Female
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Works By

Preview all
1 The Gender Politics of Underbelly Razor Marise Williams , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: Southerly , vol. 72 no. 2 2012; (p. 9-24)
'In the 1990s I was spending a lot of time right smack in the middle of notorious Razorhurst, the area of Darlinghurst and East Sydney where, in the 1920s and 1930s, the razor gangs waged war, as the vice queens Kate Leigh and Tilly Devine vied for their share of the working man's earnings through sly grog, cocaine and prostitution. It was more of a triumvirate of crime bosses - Leigh, Devine and Phil "the Jew" Jeffs - but the women were the ones who ruled the Sydney underworld roost. The Melbourne upstart Norman Bruhn who took on the triumvirate in 1927 didn't last long. At the time, I had no idea just how close I was to the history of the birth of organized crime in Australia. Larry Writer's book, Razor, about "this wild, romantic, dreadful period in Sydney's history" wasn't published until 2001 and Screentime's television adaptation of Writer's book, Underbelly Razor, aired in 2011...' (Soure: Introduction)
1 The White Woman's Burden : Whiteness and the Neo-Colonialist Historical Imagination in The Proposition (John Hillcoat, 2005) Marise Williams , 2009 single work criticism
— Appears in: Studies in Australasian Cinema , vol. 3 no. 3 2009; (p. 265-278)
'John Hillcoat's film The Proposition (2005), written by Nick Cave and set in a late 1880s Australian outback, is a colonial ballad of rape, murder, revenge and fratricide. The central narrative arc is concerned with relations between men, the English Captain Stanley and the Irish Burns gang representing, respectively, the law and the lawless, civilizing imperialists and wild colonials. Drawing on Richard Dyer's White, this article explores the gender-coded white racial imagery of the film and argues that the figure of the white woman signifies what is really at stake: a cultural and racial logic of whiteness as definitive of the 'Australian'.' (Author's abstract)
X