Settler romances and the Australian girl
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e doi:10.1057/palgrave.fr.9400345
Settler romances and the Australian girl Tanya Dalziell; University of Western Australia Press, Crawley, 2004, 208p, ISBN 1-9206-9420-X d20.50 (Pbk)
Offering a detailed reading of turn-of-century adventure fictions and early ethnographies, this intriguing study explores how highly charged narratives of 198
feminist review 86 2007
book reviews
‘whiteness’ and ‘femininity’ serviced the invention of colonial Australia. Drawing upon the familiar symbolic figure of the cheeky, white, middle-class ‘New Woman,’ Dalziell defines the ‘Australian Girl’ as not merely a local representation of this controversial character, but rather as a regionally specific manifestation of race, gender, sexual, class, and colonial anxieties. By deconstructing fictional representations of this figure, the author seeks to understand how deeper ideological forces articulated with the emergence of a new Australian nationalism. Selected texts animate a world of uncertain subjectivities. Dramatic encounters between the Australian Girl and imaginary ‘natives’ (whether fictitiously or ethnographically rendered) sustain the various narrative plots of these literary sources. Dalziell’s analysis reveals how themes of alterity (or ‘otherness’) resulting from such adventures serve to highlight tensions over the fictitiousness of the (white) settler subject. Ultimately, they seek to reconcile the disorders of gender and class that so characterized life within this outpost of empire. Her close readings also expose the central ideological displacements through which new capitalist forms of economy (characterized by the extractive mining industry) become not only justified as inevitable, but naturalized as evolutionary progress within the appropriated landscapes of the colonial frontier. Surprisingly, the role of Australian Federation (enacted in 1901) remains absent from this study. Could the ambiguous and contested subjectivities traced through these literary texts reflect a unique period of social instability while the disparate (and previously separate) Australian colonies searched for an imagined unity under national federation? As a collection of turn-of-century texts, do Dalziell’s sources represent a specific, and possibly heightened, discourse of popular anxiety? Indeed, her discussion (p. 49) of the symbolic restoration of the settler economy and ‘gendered racial identities,’ through reference to British superiority, suggests the unspoken fear (and thus acknowledgement) of the artifice of this new antipodean nation. An explicit recognition of the Federation project might help situate the deployment of ‘nationalism’ as a profound, if displaced, theme throughout this literature. While the discursive conditions of nation-building are far from resolved in contemporary Australia, a point elegantly developed in the final chapter of the volume, the unique historic events that surrounded the original creation and consumption of this literature may well have influenced the particular nature of their ‘ideological manoeuv
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