Writing Australian Unsettlement

Modes of Poetic Invention 1796-1945

Michael Farrell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781137485717
• eBook ISBN: 9781137465412
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A bold work of synthetic scholarship, Writing Australian Unsettlement argues that the history of Australian literature contains the rough beginnings of a new literacy. Michael Farrell reads songs, letters and visual poems by Indigenous farmers and stockmen, the unpunctuated journals of early settler women, drover tree-messages and carved clubs, and a meta-commentary on settlement from Moore River (the place escaped from in The Rabbit-Proof Fence) in order to rethink old forms. The book borrows the figure of the assemblage to suggest the active and revisable nature of Australian writing, arguing against the "settling" effects of its prior editors, anthologists, and historians. Avoiding the advancement of a new canon, Farrell offers instead an unsettled space in which to rethink Australian writing.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 The Hunted Writer: Ned Kelly’s The Jerilderie Letter and Bennelong’s “Letter to Mr Philips, Lord Sydney’s Steward”
• Chapter 2 An Australian Poetics of the Plough: The Jerilderie Letter
• Chapter 3 Unnecessary Inventions: Jong Ah Sing’s The Case
• Chapter 4 Open Secrets: Dorothea Mackellar’s Coded Diaries and Norman Harris’s “Letter to Jim Bassett”
• Chapter 5 Boredom: Charles Harpur’s “Note to the Song of ‘Good Night’ ” and Mary Fullerton’s “Bromide”
• Chapter 6 Unsettling the Field: Ngarla Songs and Christopher Brennan’s Musicopoematographoscope
• Chapter 7 Writing to Order: Gladys Gilligan’s “The Settlement”
• Chapter 8 Homelessness: Ann Williams’s and Sarah Davenport’s Travelling Diaries; Drover Bush Texts; Wiradjuri Club Drawings; Charlie Flannigan’s Baroque Drawings 1893
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index