|
HOME
COURSE
INFORMATION
SYLLABUS
RESOURCES
Timeline
Indigenous People
Cultural Identity
Gender issues
Natural Environment
Photo
Gallery
|
FICTION
DOWN UNDER
English
215
| Gender
Issues--Australia |
While
women writers have, in Australia as elsewhere,
always been dominant in the less elitist literary genres, especially
children's writing, their contribution to 19th century Australian
fiction was for many years disregarded, or dismissed
as "colonial"--inauthentic, imitative, and overly concerned
with romance. [The Cambridge Companion to Australian Literature,
p. 68]
|
| ************************* |
| If
one thinks of the average Australian reader of the late nineteenth
century as a middle-class or lower-middle-class woman living in the
suburbs, say, of Melbourne or Adelaide, it is difficult to see what
appeal she might have found, either to thought or feeling, in the
kind of Bulletin writing that presented itself in the '90s
as the only form of writing in Australian that spoke for authentic
feeling and true national spirit. Only life in the Australian bush,
and bush values as embodied in the lives of bush workers--all male
of course--are "Australian"; everything else is false, derivative,
"English." Any form of suburban existence is rejected,
and the whole world of women. Half a dozen of Lawson's later
stories, admittedly not his best, are devoted to the spectacle of
a once independent male, a mate of the narrator, who has fallen victim
to marriage, a regular job in town, temperance and religion--the last
two especially being the sphere of baleful female influence. (What
a bold and intelligent woman thought of all this we know from the
stories of Lawson's contemporary, Barbara Baynton, where the bush
male of Bulletin fiction appears in a different light altogether;
as lying, lazy, cowardly, vindictive, a heartless exploiter of his
mates--the female ones, anyway--and a drunken brute and betrayer.)
[David Malouf: "Made in England: Australia's British Inheritance,"
Quarterly Essay No. 12, p. 30-31] |
| Gender
Issues--New Zealand |
| ************************* |
| Women's
Suffrage, a major element in New Zealand's self-perception,
largely because it was granted at a national level in 1893, before
any other nation in the world, prompted surprisingly little imaginative
literature at the time. ...In the area of creative writing the pickings
continue to be slim. ...The minimal imaginative response to suffrage
itself is perhaps because interest has been dissipated across a range
of current contemporary women's issues, or absorbed into the markedly
heightened general awareness of women's writing. [The Oxford Companion
to New Zealand Literature, pp. 595-6] |
| ************************* |
| Te
Rangitopeora...was a famous composer and the niece of Te Rauparaha.
She was a leader of her people and fought in battle.
She was one of five women to sign the Treaty of Waitangi. [Ross Calman:
The Treaty of Waitangi, p. 13] |
| ************************* |
|
[B]y the mid 1800s there were more literate Maori than there were
Pakeha (New Zealanders of European descent). In part Maori literacy
was an expression of their willingness to embrace the teachings of
Christian missionaries. Yet it has to be said that Maori society also
clings to ideas that may be well past their "shelf life."
The most visible of these is its widespread refusal to allow
women speaking rights on marae, even new marae such as those
at Victoria University or our new national museum, Te Papa. [David
Young, New Zealand: Land and People, p. 5] |
|
|