AustLit

'Rachael Weaver has alerted us to the racial violence of colonial short stories, and notes that "[m]any novels also show graphic instances of frontier violence as part of larger and more wide ranging narratives" (fn 1, 33). One sub-genre of the novel form that does this is the carceral novel, such as Caroline Leakey's 'The Broad Arrow' (1859) and Marcus Clarke's 'For the Term of His Natural Life' (1874), which depict the explicit violence of the penal system through convict protagonists. This essay shows that violence abounds in colonial fiction not only in genres that make it explicit, but also where it is embedded - in novels usually categorised in the realist-romance genres (Giles; Dalziell; Thomson). often analysed in terms of gendered inequity (Harris), class relations (Thomson), and colonial representations of "national" identity (Allen; Spender; Gelder and WEAVER), novels by a number of major female novelists from the mid-nineteenth century to the First World War are revisited here through the lens of their treatment and performance of violence.' (Publication abstract) 

'The opening sentence of the first short story Elizabeth Harrower ever completed 3 plunges the reader into a dramatic meteorological event:

And then, as if the lightning that ripped the sky apart wasn’t enough, the lights round the edge of the swimming pool, and even the three big ones sunk into it on cement piles, went out. At once the solid blackness rang with shrieks and laughter; only Janet was struck dumb to find that she had been obliterated. It was like nothing so much as that astronomical darkness into which she had been plunged last year when they took out her tonsils. (Introduction)

'Helen Garner's 1984 novella, The Children's Bach opens with a description and commentary on the famous photograph of Alfred Lord Tennyson and his family taken en pleine air at their house on the Isle of Wight in 1862:

'Dexter found, in a magazine. a photograph of the poet Tennyson, his wife and their two sons walking in the garden of their house on the Isle of Wight. To the modern eye it is a shocking picture: they are all, with the exception of the great man himself, bundled up in such enormous, incapacitating garments. Eye-line: Tennyson looks into the middle distance. His wife, holding his arm and standing very close to his side, gazes up into his face. One boy holds his father's hand and looks up at him. The other boy holds his mother's and looks into the camera with a weak, rueful expression. Behind them, out of focus, twinkles the windy foliage of a great garden. Their shadows fall across the lawn: they have just taken a step. Tennyson's hands are large square paws, held up awkwardly at stomach level. His wife's face is gaunt and her eyes are set in deep sockets. It is a photo of a family. The wind puffs out the huge stiff curved sleeve of the woman's dress, and brushes back off his forehead the long hair of the father's boy who is turned towards the drama of his parents' faces; though he is holding his father's hand, he is separate from the group, and light shows between his tightly buttoned torso and his father's leg.' (Introduction)