“Not Me Go to England No More”: Michael Farrell’s <em>Writing Australian Unsettlement</em>

Abstract

Not Me Go to England No More: Michael Farrell's Writing Australian UnsettlementMichael Farrell. Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention, 17961945. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. 223 pp. $95.00. ISBN 978-1-13748571-7In this significant critical work, Michael Farrell offers up a dialectical method (not announced as such), which I daresay unworthy of such a one as Lionel Trilling. In chapter 1, Hunted Writer, Farrell provides a bracing reading of through both The Jerilderie Kelly-the notorious bushranger (11)-and also Bennelong's Letter to Lord Mr Philips, Lord Sidney's Steward. By pairing particular texts-so historically fecund as regards discursivity of settler-hunter (Kelly) vis-a-vis Indigenous travel (Bennelong)-in a poetics of unsettlement, Farrell maintains that these two colonial writers were participants, as both protagonists and victims (13). The integrity of Farrell's readings stands on their own merits: there no need to pun-for Farrell has already criticized others for exploiting affective, punning quality of word unsettlement (7)-to tell us that that protagonist/victim synchronicity that Kelly and Bennelong apparently share an fact (13) that informs Farrell's readings. Indeed, to unsettle so iconic a figure as Kelly just a dialectic but also a dialogue among genres: cinematically, as Farrell points out, Kelly has been played on film by both Mick Jagger and Heath Ledger, while culinarily Kelly's image used to sell pork in Castlemaine (13).Bennelong, Farrell points out, name of an electorate in New South Wales-and Sydney Opera House at Bennelong Point (14). Farrell not seeking writer behind two remarkable texts, but rather considering literal manifestation of Kelly and Bennelong being both hunter and hunted, and how this plays out in their writing (14). If we have hunter, hunted, and their writing, but we are seeking writer behind writings in literal terms, then why, though, does Farrell mention that Bennelong first Aboriginal, along with a man called Yemmerrawanne, to go to England and learn to speak English (14)? Surely, Bennelong was murdered his own tribe because of his writings: diachronic and synchronic approaches do, as here, slide in and out of our perceptual field as we work through Farrell's groundbreaking study. One wonders whether Farrell, having already entrenched his study in Foucauldian theory, might have gone one further to distinguish langue from parole (in Saussure's terms). Indeed, insofar as Farrell does well to mention film-for example, 1913 version of Adam Lindsay Gordon's Sick Stockrider (15)-there latitude for Farrell to engage poetic invention as it obtains in cinematic act, actor, action, enactment, reenactment, and so on as modalities of unsettlement.Despite iconicity of Kelly and his Letter, which was only read before he was hanged-pace Farrell's risible phrasing, Ned Kelly was hung [sic] at age of 25 (16)-but generally available until 2001, when it was edited Alex McDermott and of course popularized Peter Carey's 2001 novel The True History of Kelly Gang, Farrell sharp to argue that Letter's inclusion in Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature is and an unsettling event. The Letter's inclusion framed in terms of its literary merit or its poetics; therefore, it can be read as merely a significant or interesting historical document, interesting perhaps as much for its lack of literary merit (its semiliterate grammar, for example) as its violent attitude and colorful descriptions of police (16). Farrell also persuasively catholic in embracing varieties of enchantment among new practices of reading and of writing, arguing-contra David McCooey's assertion that the dominant feature [of Kelly's Letter] (17)-This emphasis on voice paradoxically erases orality as a settlement phenomenon and distracts us from practice of textual literacy. …