AustLit

'In Specters of Marx Derrida urges us to recognise the phantoms that haunt the literary, the political, the social, the corporate, insisting that '[h]aunting belongs to the structure of every hegemony'. Faced with the recognition of the heavily haunted landscape that we invariably inhabit, we have been compelled to seek out appropriate metaphors to represent such phenomena. Captured through the figure of the ghost, the vampire, the monstrous and the uncanny, the spectral is the new black - we all see dead people! The problem is, of course, that they are not necessarily the same people - or if they are, they mean different things to different folk. Where once these phantoms might have been seen to exist at the limit of the imaginary, they are now recognised as imbuing and infiltrating the very marrow of our being, both troubling and constituting the stories that we tell, the films that we make, the theses that we write.' (Author's abstract)

'This paper examines the cultural significance of Australian ghost stories, with particular reference to the nineteenth century. The paper considers the specific qualities of these stories in the context of the colonial experience of Australia. The foundation of the penal colony and the dispossession of the Aborigines are proposed as significant contributing factors to any specificity relating to Australian ghost stories. The narrative theme of 'buried country' coming to the surfaces is a feature of late nineteenth century ghost stories, told from the colonisers' perspective, concerning encounters with Aboriginal burial grounds or massacre sites. the uniqueness of the Australian landscape is also considered as a contributing factor to ghost stories or alleged hauntings occurring in the Australian interior.' (p. 469-470)

In this essay, Sheila Collingwood-Whittick states: 'Kate Grenville's The Secret River, an elegantly-written, meticulously-crafted and extremely readable novel, provides a classic example of white Australian anxiety and ambivalence over the nation's origins. More significantly perhaps, and in direct contradiction with the author's declarations about her book, The Secret River is paradigmatic both of the difficulty settler descendants have in facing some of the grim truths of colonial history, and of their consequent inability to exorcise the ghosts that haunt the national conscience.' (p. 126)

'The two novels this paper focuses on, Remembering Babylon and The Conversations at Curlow Creek, testify to David Malouf's ongoing 'dialogue with Australia'. Published in 1993 and 1996, two centuries after the arrival of the First Fleet of convicts, they engage with crucial issues in a postcolonial Australia which still has to negotiate its existential uncertainty. By returning to the first half of the nineteenth century, the narratives face the ghosts of the past which have haunted Australia, notably the stain of its origins as a penal colony: a sense of exile to the edge of the world is combined with the legacy of historical wrongs, the atrocities of the convict system and the devastating impact of colonization on the Aboriginal peoples - from dispossession to massacre or assimilationist policies which have engendered social alienation and spiritual dislocation.' (p. 270)