“So homesick for Anzac”? Australian Novelists and the Shifting Cartographies of Gallipoli

Abstract

Australian literary responses to the Great War tend to be described as decidedly conservative in outlook and form, with Australian novelists as commemorators-in-chief, propping up a national tale in a distinctly Australian “Great War style”. This chapter shows how recent Australian novels remap that conflict, and the Gallipoli Peninsula in particular: Bruce Scates’ On Dangerous Ground (2012) and Fiona McIntosh’s Nightingale (2014) write the war as a world war, with international casts and narratives that cut across national boundaries. Brenda Walker’s The Wing of Night (2005), on the other hand, plays with readers’ knowledge of the campaign and quickly leaves Gallipoli behind to retrace how Anzac’s costly shadow reaches into the small, private spaces of Western Australian homes, well beyond 1915.