Australian Fiction as Archival Salvage

A. Frances Johnson, Ph.D (2009), The University of Melbourne, is a prize-winning poet and novelist and head of the Creative Writing program at the University of Melbourne. She has published widely on portrayals of colonial Indigenous figures in Australian literature. Her novel Eugene's Falls (Arcadia, 2007) retraced the journeys of 19th century colonial painter Eugene von Guerard. A new novel in progress explores French first-contact histories in Southern Tasmania.

• AcknowledgementsA Note on StyleIntroduction: Making and Unmaking the Postcolonial Historical Novel1 Genre Memory: Australian Historical Novels in ContextPostcolonial Provocations: Old and New Approaches to Genre Intercultural Representation: Intergeneric Strategies in Eugene’s Falls and Beyond 2 Intertextuality and the Postcolonial Novel of HistoryRecent Explorations of Intertextuality and Heteroglossia: The Influence of Benang and That Deadman DanceTheories of Intertextuality and the Postcolonial ContextIntertextuality and Intercultural Subjectivity: Australian Contexts3 Elision and Engagement: Writing Indigeneity in Post-Bicentennial Historical Novels New Speech Genres: Portrayals of Indigeneity in White Writing 1989–2000 Out of the Impasse? Re-thinking Intercultural Engagement and Subject-Positions4 Postmodern Rats in the Ranks: The Novelist and the Historian as Raiders of the Colonial ArchiveThe Trouble with History: Scaling the ArchiveIdeology and Politics: A Background to the History WarsThe Novelist in the Archive: Kate Grenville’s The Secret River Trilogy and Kim Scott’s Benang and That Deadman Dance White-Gloved Border Police: Archival Custody and the Protection of History Whose Treasure? Clendinnen’s Reef and the Wreck of the Postcolonial Novel5 Speaking in Tongues: The Novelist as Historiographic FoolHistoriographic Metafiction as Postmodern, Postcolonial Intervention Metafictional Conceits in Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang and Robert Drewe’s Our Sunshine Metafictional Tactics in Eugene’s FallsFocalization and Radical Polyphony in Recent Postcolonial Historical NovelsLearning from Scott and Carey: Polyphony, Translation, and Mistranslation in the Postcolonial Novel6 Writing South of South: Extinction Discourse in Novelizations of Tasmanian Colonial PastsRoving History: Intercultural Representation in the Novels of Rohan WilsonEden Unsettled: Parody and Post-Gothicism in Matthew Kneale’s English Passengers Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish: History and Story in the Postmodern AcquariumConclusion: Beyond the Dry DockAppendix 1: Postcolonial/Post-Colonial Debates in ContextAppendix 2: Lessons in ‘The Lost Garden’: A First-Contact Tasmanian Historical Novel in Progress Works Cited Index