AustLit

Marquis analyzes works from Australia, New Zealand and the U.K. to suggest that time-slip fiction "for all its pleasure in the historical moment, articulates anxiety that puts the present into question, not so much child's play as games of the dark" (63). Her discussion of Ruth Park's Playing Beatie Bow claims that the novel seems to 'guard against the recognition of a problematic colonial past' (63), through the constrcution of a 'complicated family history' which Marquis argues, serves to occlude the larger colonial history of relations between the settlers and the indigenous population, who 'barely rate a mention' (61). Here, Marquis draws upon the work of Clare Bradford, who she says, 'has repeatedly shown this is a history of invasion, accommodated by white authors in a variety of textual moves that in general discount the singularity of the aboriginal experience and the historical depth of their relation with the land' (see Bradford, 1997). Marquis argues that the narrative dynamic obscures this local history through a 'double anchoring of the legitimate past in a European moment' and the ways it invests the domestic order - the love story - with irrestible power (61). She proceeds with a comparative analysis of Spirits of the Lake by New Zealand author Beverly Dunlop claiming that ''the absence of the indigene seems more noteworthy [if read] alongside another novel that is equally concerned with home and family' (61).