Elspeth Tilley, White Vanishing: Rethinking Australia’s Lost-in-the-Bush Myth

Abstract

In White Vanishing: Rethinking Australia’s Lost-in-the-Bush Myth, Elspeth Tilley analyses a recurrent motif in non-Indigenous Australian literature, that of narratives of disappearance. White Vanishing seeks to deconstruct the mythic, discursive, and ideological dimensions at work in “lost-in-the-bush” episodes. Tilley points out that those who disappear are “invariably white, like the authors” (9), and therefore proposes an analysis of white disappearance narratives in non-Indigenous Austral...