ABSTRACT

This is the first book to examine how Australian fiction writers draw on family histories to reckon with the nation’s colonial past. Located at the intersection of literature, history, and sociology, it explores the relationships between family storytelling, memory, and postcolonial identity. 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.

chapter |15 pages

Introduction

Reckoning with the past: family, memory, nation

chapter 1|20 pages

Dredging up family secrets

Kate Grenville’s The Secret River and Richard Flanagan’s Death of a River Guide

chapter 2|18 pages

Confronting the ‘double fold of silence’

Kim Scott and Hazel Brown’s Kayang & Me and Sally Morgan’s My Place

chapter 3|18 pages

Belonging across generations

Brian Castro’s Birds of Passage and Shanghai Nights and Alex Miller’s The Ancestor Game

chapter 4|20 pages

Returning to homelands

Christos Tsiolkas’ Dead Europe and Christopher Koch’s The Many-Coloured Land: A Return to Ireland

chapter 5|17 pages

Listening to the ghosts of the past

Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth

chapter |6 pages

Conclusion