ABSTRACT
For a number of women writers, as the last chapter has shown, the narrative of the city-woman who has to survive in the bush is a story of endurance, suffering and exclusion as well as a testing-ground for ways of belonging. For other women writers, the bush became a place of freedom, a place where city women could escape the conventions and restrictions of confinement to domesticity and society’s rules. In the harshness of life in the bush, it was suggested, such limitations for women could not apply, as they were expected to work ‘like men’. An early model for articulating these often contradictory responses of women to the bush is provided in Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career (1901) which exemplifies both the positive and negative aspects of bush life. But, whereas both Grenville and Sallis, in their novels discussed in the previous chapter, find some of these redemptive qualities in ‘going bush’, even for those excluded from discourses of belonging, Thea Astley and Gillian Mears focus in their texts on the destructive and often physical violence that they associate with country towns.
