Colloquy, Issue 7, Australian Literary Studies

Issue Seven

Australian Literary Studies, 20(3) 2002. University of Queensland Press. ISSN 0004-9697.

Caron James

This issue of Australian Literary Studies presents articles on what at first would seem a disparate selection of subjects and topics. On closer examination, however, most of the articles could be linked to a discussion of the experience of the "Other", one of the more fashionable of current critical concepts.

We have Graham Huggan meditating on "memory and post-colonial fiction" about impoverished outlaw Ned Kelly; Lyn Jacobs surveying Asian Australians' writing; Susan Sheridan discussing the work of 1950s female writers and artists; Margaret Henderson on regulative feminist autobiography; John McLaren on John Morrison's radical nationalism; Toby Benis on criminality and convicts in George Barrington's work; Karen Barker on the work of Brian Castro; Martin Duwell on Les Murray as presented in Peter Alexander's biography. This edition also includes its annual bibliography of studies in Australian literature for 2001.

Given the current controversial treatment of the so-called "boat people" and strong criticism of the Australian government's policies by the United Nations, Jacobs' paper ìAbout Face: Asian-Australians at Homeî is timely indeed. It would make a useful starting point for under-graduate tutorials, for discussion on questions such as Ien Ang's query if "Asians in Australia" is a "contradiction in terms" or on the reasons for Asians of all nations to be lumped together as if they were one. Jacobs herself treats all Asians as a uniform entity. It's a bit like saying "Europeans" and discussing English, French, Greeks and Germans as one group. Principally, she surveys Chinese-Australian writers alone, and this is what her paper should state clearly. Thailand, for example, is as different to mainland China as Australia is to the US , and though a high proportion of Thais have some Chinese racial makeup, the cultural background is quite different. China itself, being a major power in Asia and having influenced smaller countries there for thousands of years, has indirectly fostered the tendency to say "Asian", as if referring to the whole of the continent, while actually meaning "Chinese". It is interesting to remember too that the Middle Eastern countries like Iran and Saudi Arabia are also, geographically at least, part of Asia. The two major questions further arising from Jacobs' paper are, to what extent the19th century colonial attitudes still inform attitudes in Australia and whether the Anglo-Australian majority accept or merely tolerate minorities.

Karen Barker's paper ìThe Artful Man: Theory and Authority in Brian Castro's Fictionî, looks not at Castro as a Chinese-Australian "Other" but refreshingly at the way he uses literary theory in his writing. Barker exposes the critics who have "grumbled about" Castro's use of theory "ever since the French theorist Roland Barthes made a brief appearance in his first novel Birds of a Passage". Her essay provides an overview of critical responses to and the discussion of Castro's novel Double-Wolf.