ABSTRACT
One of the striking aspects of contemporary Australian women’s writing is its ongoing preoccupation with contesting stereotypical gender roles that gathered momentum in the 1890s when discourses of new nationhood constructed a legend of Australian national character that was ‘specifically masculine: nomadic, independent, anti-authoritarian and fiercely loyal to mates’ (Ferres 1993b: 1). As Kay Ferres points out, ‘these values were explicitly set against the dismal experience of urban life and domesticity’ (Ferres 1993b: 1) resulting in the entrapment of women, so often associated with these ‘dismal experience[s]’ and therefore ‘out of place’ in the bush or outback (both ideologically loaded terms still associated with nonurban Australia), in negative representations. While often idealised as the ‘Australian Bushwoman’ or the ‘Bush Mum’, more often women were characterised as ‘drovers’ wives’ – ‘longsuffering and resigned to neglect’ (Ferres 1993b: 1). Such characterisation and confinement to the realm of the domestic rather than the public sphere profoundly alienated women from discourses of nation. As Marilyn Lake suggests, despite their early enfranchisement (white Australian women were given the vote in 1902), they felt ‘oppressed by national mythologies and histories, by a national culture that insulted and trivialised them’ with the ‘nation’ and ‘women’ seemingly ‘mutually exclusive categories’ (Lake 1997: 48). From the beginning of such emergent discourses, however, Australian colonial and post-colonial women writers, although excluded, silenced and marginalised, ‘still found ways to insert a feminised response to Australian landscapes into their writing’ (Thomson 1993: 19). They did this by resisting the gender politics entrenched in such representations, often, in the process, subverting the very terms of these notions of nation and destabilising the foundations of the narrative of nationalism and its inequalities that were integral to ‘that vision of common nationhood, egalitarianism, and the passionate brotherhood of mateship’ (Ferres 1993b: 7).
