AustLit

Michael Ackland argues that Albert Dorrington's Bulletin stories reveal 'a telling exploration of local manifestations of Orientalism, decades before Edward Said was born, that relentlessly enact contemporary anxieties and disconcertingly emphasize the unstable, spectacluar aspects of individual identity'.

Nicholas Dunlop discusses the 'difficulties inherent in transferring or compressing our own epistemologies of space and time into a static, two-dimensional model' - the map. In this context he examines Peter Carey's American Dreams as 'a useful introduction to the ways in which Carey's work frequently questions the use of the cartographic metaphor for the pursuit or maintenance of individual or hegemonic agendas'.

Dunlop concludes: 'American Dreams ... articulates the ways in which the manipulation of maps ... may affect cultural realities and how that culture perceives its spatial boundaries and the individuals within it'.

Patrick West argues: 'The primary effect of Elizabeth Jolley's novel The Newspaper of Claremont Street is a denial of any lasting Aboriginal presence on Australian land. It produces this effect by "filling the space" of potential Aboriginality with a universalized presentation of the archaic, European, economic antagonism between usury and substance.... the most objectionable thing about The Newspaper of Claremont Street is that its fundamental preoccupation is elevated into myth, making of the complete novel a powerful instrument of white colonization.' (p.65)