AustLit

Using the relationship between history and fiction as a starting point, the essay first looks at constructions of nationhood and national identity, a 'fantasy of Australia as the site of a privileged and realised good'. 'In accepting and supporting the fantasy of Australia as quintessentially free and equal, such constructions of national identity camouflage, at the same time as they enable, the aggression to and rejection of the Other that underlies white Australian society, historicall and today' (89). Focussing on McDonald's Ballad of Desmond Kale, the essay explores the 'dark underbelly' of such constructions of nationhood in stories.

The essay examines imaginative strategies employed in the attempt to represent the experience of death. Some of Maurice Blanchot's theories about death and dying are utilised to 'negotiate the spaces of absence and death' that inform Alex Miller's The Sitters and Noel Rowe's poem 'Next to Nothing'.

In her discussion of Llewellyn's poem 'Lemon' Collett argues that the author uses the image of the lemon to 'reveal the ordinary life as essentially interesting and valuable, not only for its idiosyncratic nature ... but also for its commonality and communality' (113).

In the early 1980s, many Australians demanded their say about 'Lindy Chamberlain'. On radio, in letters to the media, over coffee and on television, we exposed our wisdoms about mothering, matricide, inappropriate family holiday destinations, religious sects, the dressing of children in black, the desert, the law, and the requirements of justice. Australians - not for the first time - eagerly devoured tales of uncanny happenings in the desert. In the heart of the county, at Ayres Rock as it was still called, a sacrifice of some kind had occurred. 'Why would you take a child out there?' 'As if a dingo could do that!'

The article examines the representation of colonial metropolitan and suburban Melbourne in Hume's novel. The author argues that the novel 'changes the way the white colony of Australia could be imagined, or romanced, at the imperial center' (129).