Discourse of Difference: Rosa Campbell Praed’s My Australian Girlhood

Abstract

The Australian nationalist metanarrative performed “cultural apartheid” over female literary production. Excluded from official discourse and dominant literary genres, women resorted to those available in an attempt to formulate their subjectivity. Hence, their narratives became a means of talking back. Consequently, Rosa Campbell Praed’s My Australian Girlhood (1902) demonstrates character istics of autobiography, travel literature and adventure narrative, and at the same time transgresses the said genres in both their intent as well as their structural characteristics. Additionally, travelling within the colonial context, Praed inevi tably participates in the discourses of imperialism, which she is, however, found rupturing as she criticises British racial policy in Australia, thus revealing her writing as double-voiced. As a female colonial writer writing within a masculine realist literary tradition, Praed was othered by contemporary critics who either devalued her writing, or altogether dismissed it as un-Australian, ignor ing numerous instances wherein she contributes to the formulation of an 1890s identity. Therefore, to read Praed’s text means to be aware of this historically and culturally specific context.