Abstract
In 2001, Geoffrey Blainey argued that “a high proportion” of non-Indigenous Australians have developed a sense of place, “of feeling at home” in their country, that “has in part been created or manufactured”. Though historians have contributed to this, he says, “Painters and writers have done most to create it” as “They tried to provide a sense of belonging, and a sense of continuity and history” (Boyer Lecture n. pag.). Several recent Australian novels - each with some historical basis - are set in Queensland’s north and offer contemporary perceptions of the area’s history from settlement to the end of the twentieth century. Published the year after the Mabo Decision, and Prime Minister Paul Keating’s “Redfern Speech”, David Malouf’s 1993 novel, Remembering Babylon, is a fitting point to commence exploring depictions of settler society’s relations to northern Queensland. Three other novels included in this study are Alex Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country (2003), and Landscape of Farewell (2007), along with Gordon Smith’s Dalrymple (2006). In these stories northern settlers struggle to cope - physically, psychologically and emotionally. The difficulties for settlers in developing an attachment to north Queensland, and their sometimes extreme responses, illustrate the powerful interaction between place, belonging and identity.
Highlights
In 2001, Geoffrey Blainey argued that “a high proportion” of non-Indigenous Australians have developed a sense of place, “of feeling at home” in their country, that “has in part been created or manufactured”
The enervating tropical climate is depicted as a formidable impediment for settlers as its challenge to their physical capacity alters their self-perception
In Remembering Babylon, the heat thwarts schoolteacher George Abbott who had resolved to uphold “the duty he felt to his own high prospects” (44)
Summary
In 2001, Geoffrey Blainey argued that “a high proportion” of non-Indigenous Australians have developed a sense of place, “of feeling at home” in their country, that “has in part been created or manufactured”. “In the dark hours,” explains the narrator “when you no longer stood there as a living marker with all the glow of the white man’s authority about you,” the features and boundaries marked on the map “reverted to being a creek-bed or ridge of granite like any other, and gave no indication that six hundred miles away, in the Lands Office in Brisbane, this bit of country had a name set against it on a numbered document, and a line drawn that was empowered with all the authority of the Law” (9).
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