Twisting the Australian realist short story: Murray Bail’s “Camouflage”

Abstract

Although the short story is regarded as a minor genre in many literary traditions, it is arguably a major one in Australian literature, which, more specifically, was long dominated by the realist short story. Deriving from the colonial “yarns”, the so-called “hard-luck stories” were indeed felt to be characterized by a realism that was in turn seen to result from the archetypal dryness of Australia itself. While the contemporary Australian writer Murray Bail has repeatedly questioned the realistic quality of his homeland’s literature, he has also sought to broaden the subgenre to which it has often been reduced, namely bush realism. With “Camouflage” (1998), Bail appropriates the hard-luck story to convey a marginal perspective. This article shows how this strategy of revision allows him to contest both the archetypality of bush realism and the stereotypical perceptions of the Australian landscape, thereby problematizing the highly controversial relationship between place and literature.