Jennifer Rutherford

One Love Too Many: The Undoing of Pauline Hanson

This paper focuses on desire and its animating force in the Pauline Hanson One Nation Party. Examining the symbolic logic underpinning the rapport between Pauline Hanson and her constituency, it explores the connection between forms of love and forms of political organisation. Locating the implosion of One Nation within the context of Hansons failure to sustain the love-bonds of a totalitarian leader with her/his followers, it argues that the lack of democracy within One Nation was not a cause of its failure. The desire animating One Nation was for an autocratic leader and the totalitarian structure of One Nation posed no obstacle to the movements fortunes until love shifted the libidinal field.

The Secret of the Father in the Colonial Secret: Rosa Praed’s ‘Weird Melancholy’

Archives are infectious. When you rifle through the papers of the dead you feel them touch you. As Brian Castro has written, the dead are ‘still active, they flutter here and there, moths before flames. With their painted fingernails they pull out cigarettes, underscore lines of poetry. They’ve left us these signs. Signs which make us what we are. You simply have to know how to collect them’ (7). I am thinking of these lines as I open box after box of Thomas Lodge Murray-Prior’s papers in The National Library of Australia. I am exploring both literary melancholy and melancholia in colonial Australian writing. Murray-Prior’s daughter, the colonial novelist Rosa Praed, is well known for her liberal use of the trope of ‘weird melancholy’. I am interested, in particular, in the relationship between Rosa Praed and her father, and how this relationship might have influenced the ‘weird melancholy’ that pervades her Australian writing. Australian critics have made little of this relationship. Indeed, one can speak of an organized amnesia in regard to a familial bond which hinges the emergence of an Australian literature with the blood acts of the Australian squatocracy.

The After Silence of the Son/G

The various literature and other publications that have been published to highlight the significance of the history and beauty of Australia are discussed.

Writing the Square: Paul Carter's Nearamnew and the Art of Federation

Ted Hughes tells a story of the Polish poet Milosz lying in a doorway watching the bullets lifting the cobbles out of the street beside him and reflecting: ‘that most poetry is not equipped for life in a world where people actually do die. But some is’ (Feldstein 2001, 199). In Milosz’s reflection one hears an echo of the question of the ancients, ‘How is one to live?’ and interior to this question another, ‘How is one to write?’ Or, ‘how is one to write in order to live?’ The attempt to answer these questions—to write a poetry for life—is found in many of his poems that return again and again to the question of responsibility to the legacy of the dead, naming them, recording the event of their deaths and the culpability of those who survived in a poetry which is never only that, but which masters an orientation he describes as to ‘remain aware of the weight of fact without yielding to the temptation to become only a reporter’ (Milosz 2001). In this paper I want to take up this question, posed by Milosz—of a poetry ‘equipped for a life in which people actually do die’—to consider what form such a poetry might take in Australia, where whole populations have died, and the culture en masse is intent on keeping the weight of this fact uninscribed.

Hansonella: The Morphology of a Modern Folk Tale

In this essay I’m interested in the retroactive invention of Hansonella, a fairy-tale heroine created to assimilate the Australian nation’s racist excess. I suggest here, that the fairy story — an essentially conservative and mythologising narrative — provided the retroactive means for the Australian nation to internalise and narrativise the emergence of a populist far-right party in Australia in the1990’s. Intense antipathy to indigenous Australians and non-Anglo migrants has been integral to Australia’s culture and history, but in white mythology, Australia is a culture of an enhanced generosity and goodness. Elsewhere I have called this fantasy structure the Australian Good, and argued that the fantasy of Australia as a good and neighbourly nation repeats and frames a disparate set of cultural practices, discourses and historical epochs. The underbelly of this fantasy of the good nation has been the dispossession of indigenous Australians, The White Australia Policy, the assimilation practices of the twentieth century, a pronounced antipathy towards the feminine and the intellectual, and the continued cultural policing of traits that carry the stain of difference.