Redrawing the Map

Abstract

Space, place, and landscape are long-standing themes in Australian literary and cultural studies and, from the colonial era to the present day, Australian cultural narratives have proven fertile ground for spatial analysis. In his influential 1986 book on Australian film and literature, National Fictions,1 Graeme Turner argues that narrative forms are, in the Australian context, profoundly tied up with national myths of land, landscape, and identity. Moreover, Turner argues, Australian filmic and fictive texts “invite us to accept that the land is central to a distinctively Australian meaning.”2 This concept of the “land producing its literature” has, he continues, in turn influenced both Australian literary and film criticism, though the former more strongly than the latter.3 This carries through into theatre for, as Joanne Tompkins argues in her landmark study Unsettling Space,4 spatial tensions driven by anxieties about contested land, nationalism, colonial settlement, and Aboriginal reconciliation play out as narratives on the Australian stage, where the performance of nationhood and identity is dramatically enacted: “Australian theatre not only contests conventional Australian history and culture; it also stages alternative means of managing the production of space in a spatially unstable nation.”5KeywordsLiterary TextCultural GeographyFilm StudyNarrative FictionColonial SettlementThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.