Building on earlier literary critiques and gender analysis, very different readings of the environmental imagination at play in these texts are possible. Two key texts, Working Bullocks (1926) by Prichard and The Man Hamilton (1928) by Palmer, can be explored in context of recent discourses on ecological sensibilities, identities of place and transnational cosmopolitanism, home and homecoming in the literary imagination, and rapid change through climate change. Often as a result of their beliefs they sought out remote country locations and ‘wilderness areas’ in which to live and write about.
In a time of rapid environmental change, this essay re-visits these writers, that is, Vance and Nettie Palmer, Katharine Susannah Prichard and others of their generation, and it investigates their important initiatives in challenging dominant and habitual ways of understanding and seeing the natural environment.
SUSANNAH FLOOD PERSONAL LIFE HOW TO
Without the literary imagination, people and places appear ‘uncanny and ghostlike’, and Nettie evolved a schema in and through language to help others learn how to dwell in the land. Vance Palmer, Australia’s leading man of letters of the inter-war period, claimed his was a generation seeking to find ‘harmony’ with the environment Nettie Palmer believed that writers’ powers depended on their capacity to find a spiritual home in place.
Constructions and narratives of one’s ‘spiritual home’ in the environment by authors and critics can challenge colonial and postcolonial understandings, of - in this instance - Australia. As autobiography read alongside archival sources, “City Girl” yields some valuable insights into Prichard’s life.Įco-centric ideologies recognise humans as an interdependent part of a larger biotic community and the biophysical systems that support them. As fiction, the mix of realism and romance in “City Girl” anticipate Prichard’s later novels. The tension between its fictional and autobiographical elements can be seen in an angry letter in a local newspaper rebuking the first episode for its exaggerations and untruths. Introducing the serial, the magazine stated that it was based on her experiences as a governess on an outback sheep station, a position she’d held the previous year at Tarella Station in New South Wales.
SUSANNAH FLOOD PERSONAL LIFE SERIES
One of the few works by Prichard written in the first person, it is presented as a series of letters from “Kit” (one of Prichard’s nicknames) to her mother. The focus of this paper is an earlier, obscure serial, “A City Girl in Central Australia” (1906), which is not simply a work of fiction which can be read autobiographically, but rather a work playfully positioned on the boundary of fiction and autobiography. Notably, Prichard invited an autobiographical interpretation of her children’s novel, The Wild Oats of Han (1928), while discouraging it for her novel Intimate Strangers (1937). As a biographer of the Australian novelist Katharine Susannah Prichard (1883-1969), I have found different relationships between her fiction and her life. Literary biographers often interpret their subjects’ fiction autobiographically, an approach which has been condemned by some critics.
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