ABSTRACT
What does it mean to read ‘across’ Australian and South African texts? One can search databases, ‘surf the Net’, send research assistants to hunt and gather and still reap relatively little in the way of cross-national comparisons of these two literatures. Australian and New Zealand comparisons are slightly more common, with Ian Reid’s book Fiction and the Great Depression the most outstanding example of intra-Commonwealth comparative reading. Of Australia and Canada there is more to be said: a recent collection of essays includes a bibliography of some fifty articles; a substantial comparative study, Tradition in Exile, was published in 1962, and Terry Goldie’s book, Fear and Temptation: The Image of the Indigene in Canadian, Australian and New Zealand Literature stands alone as an ambitious comparative study of settler/invader literatures.
