Ashley Barnwell - Reckoning with the Past: Family Historiographies in Postcolonial Australian Literature

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Reckoning with the Past

This book examines how Australian fiction writers draw on family histories to reckon with the nations colonial past. Located at the intersection of literature, history, and sociology, it explores the relationships between family storytelling, memory, and postcolonial identity. Discussing some of Australias most popular and critically acclaimed authors including Kate Grenville, Richard Flanagan, Sally Morgan, Andrew McGahan, Kim Scott, Brian Castro, and Christos Tsiolkas the book offers a powerful new reflection on the social role of literature in national identity and opens cross-cultural dialogue on experiences of belonging in post-settlement Australia. With attention to the political potential of family histories, Reckoning with the Past argues that authors often autobiographical works enable us to uncover, confront, and revise national mythologies.

An important contribution to the emerging global conversation about multidirectional memory and the need to attend to the effects of colonisation, this book will appeal to an interdisciplinary field of scholarly readers.

Ashley Barnwell is Ashworth Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Melbourne, Australia.

Joseph Cummins has a PhD in Literary Studies from the University of New South Wales, Australia, and serves on the board of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature.

Memory Studies: Global Constellations

Series editors

Henri Lustiger-Thaler, Ramapo College of New Jersey, USA and Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, France

The past in the present has returned in the early twenty-first century with a vengeance, and with it the expansion of categories of experience. These experiences have largely been lost in the advance of rationalist and constructivist understandings of subjectivity and their collective representations. The cultural stakes around forgetting, useful forgetting and remembering, locally, regionally, nationally and globally have risen exponentially. It is therefore not unusual that migrant memories; micro-histories; personal and individual memories in their interwoven relation to cultural, political and social narratives; the mnemonic past and present of emotions, embodiment and ritual; and finally, the mnemonic spatiality of geography and territories are receiving more pronounced hearings.

This transpires as the social sciences themselves are consciously globalizing their knowledge bases. In addition to the above, the reconstructive logic of memory in the juggernaut of galloping informationalization is rendering it more and more publicly accessible, and therefore part of a new global public constellation around the coding of meaning and experience. Memory studies as an academic field of social and cultural inquiry emerges at a time when global public debate - buttressed by the fragmentation of national narratives - has accelerated. Societies today, in late globalized conditions, are pregnant with newly unmediated and unfrozen memories once sequestered in wide collective representations. We welcome manuscripts that examine and analyze these profound cultural traces.

8. Reckoning with the Past

Family Historiographies in Postcolonial Australian Literature

Ashley Barnwell and Joseph Cummins

9. Traumatic Storytelling and Memory in Post-Apartheid South Africa

Performing Signs of Injury

Christopher J. Colvin

For more information about this series, please visit: https://www.routledge.com/sociology/series/ASHSER1411

First published 2019

by Routledge

2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

and by Routledge

52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2019 Ashley Barnwell and Joseph Cummins

The right of Ashley Barnwell and Joseph Cummins to be identified as authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Barnwell, Ashley, author. | Cummins, Joseph, author.

Title: Reckoning with the past : family historiographies in postcolonial Australian literature / Ashley Barnwell and Joseph Cummins.

Description: 1 Edition. | New York : Routledge, 2019. |

Series: Memory studies: Global constellations | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018035928 | ISBN 9781138088955 (hardback)

Subjects: LCSH: Families--Australia--History.

Classification: LCC HQ1235 .B37 2019 | DDC 306.850994--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018035928

ISBN: 978-1-138-08895-5 (hbk)

ISBN: 978-1-315-10953-4 (ebk)

We dedicate this book to Colleen Brennan a keen family historian who has always encouraged our research.

We wish to thank Andrew Metcalfe, Anne Brewster, Ken Gelder, and Kate Darian-Smith for their encouragement in the early stages of this project. Audiences at conferences including ASAL, IABA Asia Pacific, and the University of Melbournes Australian Centre seminar series also provided vital feedback on chapters-in-progress. Our thanks to Richard Flanagan for granting us permission to access his papers at the National Library of Australia; to Manuscripts staff at the NLA for their help; and to Amy Vanderharst for her research assistance. We are grateful to Neil Jordan and Alice Salt at Routledge for their enthusiasm in bringing the manuscript to fruition. And finally, we thank our family and friends for their interest and support.

A shorter version of Chapter Five is published as Barnwell, A. and Cummins, J. 2017. Family Historiography in The White Earth. Journal of Australian Studies 41(2), 15670. Reprinted by permission of Taylor & Francis. Some passages in Chapter One appear in Barnwell, A. 2018. Hidden Heirlooms: Keeping Family Secrets Across Generations. Journal of Sociology 54 (3), 44660. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications.

Just as our ancestors looked to genealogy as the model of nationhood so, perhaps, in these more complex renderings of family history, Australians may find a clue to a new sense of national becoming.

Graeme Davison, Ancestors: The Broken Lineage of Family History (2000, p. 109)

This book examines how Australian writers draw on family histories to reckon with the nations past. Often encountering the unspoken violence within the settler colonial state, the novelists we discuss Kate Grenville, Richard Flanagan, Sally Morgan, Kim Scott and Hazel Brown, Brian Castro, Alex Miller, Christos Tsiolkas, Christopher Koch, and Andrew McGahan locate the national in the personal and the public in the private. Their novels and life writing, which we call

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