Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
- INTRODUCTION
- Dedication
- CHAPTER 1 CULTURE, LANGUAGE AND THE SELF
- CHAPTER 2 IN SEARCH OF A NATIONAL IDENTITY
- CHAPTER 3 THE BUSH AND WOMEN
- CHAPTER 4 LANDSCAPE REPRESENTATION AND NATIONAL IDENTITY
- CHAPTER 5 HENRY LAWSON: THE PEOPLE'S POET
- CHAPTER 6 BARBARA BAYNTON: A DISSIDENT VOICE FROM THE BUSH
- CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSION
- NOTES
- BIBLIOGRAPHY
- INDEX
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
- INTRODUCTION
- Dedication
- CHAPTER 1 CULTURE, LANGUAGE AND THE SELF
- CHAPTER 2 IN SEARCH OF A NATIONAL IDENTITY
- CHAPTER 3 THE BUSH AND WOMEN
- CHAPTER 4 LANDSCAPE REPRESENTATION AND NATIONAL IDENTITY
- CHAPTER 5 HENRY LAWSON: THE PEOPLE'S POET
- CHAPTER 6 BARBARA BAYNTON: A DISSIDENT VOICE FROM THE BUSH
- CHAPTER 7 CONCLUSION
- NOTES
- BIBLIOGRAPHY
- INDEX
Summary
We have been destined to reproduce that sameness in which, for centuries, we have been other. … If we continue to speak this sameness, if we speak to each other as men have spoken for centuries, as they taught us to speak, we will fail each other. Again …
Luce Irigaray, ‘When our Lips Speak Together’I taped the above statement to the wall above my computer when I began this book. Whenever I have been seduced into the operations of discourse, and constrained, by the very demands of writing, to structure and order a logically consistent, unified, ‘masterly’ argument, whenever I have been tempted to reinterpret rather than deconstruct the data, to set in place new ‘truths’ rather than to decentre the old ones, I have turned to Irigaray's caution and thought again. In this study I have been concerned with the myths of Australian culture as they have been encoded into history, literature, film, critical commentary and everyday life. I have attempted to show how those myths create a reality they appear to describe. And I have gestured towards a recognition of difference, of multiplicity, of plurality within meaning and subjectivity which the master discourses have disguised. I hope that, occasionally, I have managed to speak ‘differently’ in offering a critique of Lultural representations and patriarchial presumptions.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Women and the BushForces of Desire in the Australian Cultural Tradition, pp. 171 - 189Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1989