AustLit

‘In this essay I wish to offer a tentative programme for the development of fruitful cooperation between ecocriticism and environmental ethics. What could be envisaged as a result of this cooperation would be the idea and ideal of a new ecological culture. To start with, I will submit working definitions of my key terms. While doing this, I would also like to thumbnail the agendas they include. As will become clear, I look at the environment through a dual lens – in the hope that the relationship between these two foci will yield some new insights.’ (Author’s introduction 63)

'Some time ago, I wrote an article entitled 'On Not Being Australian.' In it I explored the problem of Helen Demidenko and Mudrooroo. These two very well-known and award-winning Australian authors had been revealed as other than they claimed to be. Demidenko, not a Ukranian but, rather, just another Anglo-Australian, seemed simply deceitful, but Mudrooroo was a black street kid who had been treated as Aboriginal and was later proven to be, most likely, of African-American ancestry. I asserted in the article that the uproar over the false identities was wrapped up in the Australian need for those identities, Demidenko as the quintessential immigrant and Mudrooroo as the voice of Aboriginal Australia.' (Author's introduction 119)

‘When the Australian novelist Xavier Herbert applied for a War Service Pension in 1975, the Western Australian authorities were unable to verify his existence. The Deputy Commissioner requested that he supply his birth certificate. ‘Of course I do not have one,’ he responded, ‘have never had one.’ He had been born, he said, at a time and a place when records often were not kept, a frontier space where established social conventions had given way to makeshift. He had been told that he was born on 15 May 1901, and had always operated on that assumption, until now being informed that he had no official existence at all.’ (Author’s introduction 187)

'Elizabeth Jolley's The Well, one of the most celebrated examples of the Australian female Gothic, can also be studied as a trauma novel. Set in the vast and dry postcolonial Australian countryside, the novel deals with the intense, traumatic, and somehow bordering on the homo-erotic, relationship between elderly and embittered Hester Harper, heiress to a large agricultural estate, and young and unformed Katherine, a sixteen-year-old orphan whom Hester unofficially adopted one day...' (From author's introduction 201)

'After My Life as a Fake, Peter Carey, with his novel Theft, adds a new dimension to his themes of fakery, truth and lying. The novel reads as a combination of love story, detective novel, and thriller with a series of mysteries including an intricate plot which is further combined with and supplemented by another theme and symbolic level...' (From author's introduction 245)