The fence in Australian short fiction: ‘a constant crossing of boundaries’?

Abstract

This article contributes to discussions about the significance of fences in the Australian social imaginary. It undertakes a historical and intertextual reading of eight short stories that take the fence as their titular symbol, and explores how the fence story is rewritten at various moments of change in twentieth-century Australia. Developments in narrative form and representation are related to changes in the cultural and political contexts, through a critical engagement with Iser's argument that the institution of literature works through a ‘constant crossing of the boundary between the real and the imaginary’. As an Australian icon, the fence image illustrates the continuing power of settler discourse; however, the literary reworkings of the fence story disclose new visions of identity and otherness.

Keywords:

• dividing fences
• boundaries
• twentieth-century Australian literature
• short fiction
• the imaginary
• literature and history

Notes

 1. P Conrad, At Home in Australia, National Gallery, Canberra, 2003, p 147.

 2. R West-Pavlov, ‘Fencing in the frontier’, in R West-Pavlov and J Wawrzinek (eds), Frontier Skirmishes: Literary and Cultural Debates in Australia after 1992, Universitätsverlag Winter, Heidelberg, 2010, p 81.

 3. ibid., p 92.

 4. ‘Hanson will not call Australia home’, West Australian, 14 February 2010, p 1.

 5. CJ Dennis, ‘Billjim's back fence’, The Bulletin, vol 32, no 1662, 1911, p 48.

 6. P Carter, The Lie of the Land, Faber, London, 1996, p 10.

 7. ibid., p 217.

 8. D Fokkema, ‘Why intertextuality and rewriting can become crucial concepts in literary historiography’, Neohelicon, vol 30, 2003, pp 25–32.

 9. R Cohen, ‘Genre theory, literary history and historical change’ in D Perkins (ed), Theoretical Issues in Literary History, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1991, p 100.

10. P Ricoeur, ‘The creativity of language’, in M J Valdés (ed), A Ricoeur Reader: Reflection and Imagination, Harvester Wheatsheaf, Hemel Hempstead, 1991, p 476.

11. W Iser, ‘Fictionalising acts’, Amerikastudien/American Studies, vol 31, 1986, p 5.

12. Quoted by B Thomas, ‘The fictive and the imaginary: charting literary anthropology, or, What's literature have to do with it?’ American Literary History, vol 20, 2008, p 626.

13. B Bennett, Australian Short Fiction: A History, University of Queensland Press, St Lucia, 2002, p 316.

14. Originally published in the Australian Town and Country Journal, 13 March 1912, pp 20–1. Rpt. in J Meredith (ed), Breaker's Mate: Will H. Ogilvie in Australia, Kangaroo Press, Kenthurst, 1996, pp 151–58.

15. A P Wilson, ‘The boundary fence’, The Lone Hand, NS 1, 1914, p 196.

16. ibid., p 225.

17. J F Williams, The Quarantined Culture: Australian Reactions to Modernism 1913–1939, Cambridge University Press, Melbourne, 1995.

18. P Ricoeur, ‘Myth as the bearer of possible worlds’, in Valdés, op. cit., p 484.

19. H. Drake-Brockman, ‘Fences’, A.B.C. Weekly, vol 5, no 20, 1943, p 7. Page references hereafter are to Sydney or the Bush.

20. H Drake-Brockman, Sydney or the Bush, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1948, p 246.

21. P Cowan, ‘Author's statement’, Australian Literary Studies, vol 10, 1981, p 197.

22. ‘Angry Penguins Prosecution’, Angry Penguins, 1944, p 104.

23. P Cowan, ‘The fence’, in B Bennett (ed.), A Window in Mrs X's Place: Selected Stories, Penguin, Ringwood, 1986, p 9.

24. Bennett, op. cit., p 162.

25. See Bennett, ‘Peter Cowan's landscapes of silence’, in B Bennett and S Miller (eds), Peter Cowan: New Critical Essays, University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands, 1992, pp 89–98; and also Veronica Brady's comment on ‘language and form as self-enclosure in Peter Cowan's work’ in her essay, ‘The dark mirror of narcissus’ in V Brady, Caught in the Draught: On Contemporary Australian Culture and Society, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1994, p 118.

26. E Engelberg, Solitude and Its Ambiguities in Modernist Fiction, Palgrave, Basingstoke, 2001.

27. Williams, op. cit., p 5.

28. D Hewett, ‘Empty streets and lonely beaches’, in Bennett and Miller, op. cit., p 2.

29. The ‘chequered history’ of this story is described in the ‘Introduction’ to D Hewett, A Baker's Dozen, Penguin, Ringwood, 2001, pp 2–4.

30. G Gelbin (ed), Australians Have a Word for It, Seven Seas Books, Berlin, 1964; L Haylen (ed), The Tracks We Travel: Third Collection, Australasian Book Society, Sydney, 1965, pp 67–77. Subsequent page references to ‘The Wire Fences of Jarrabin’ are drawn from A Baker's Dozen.

31. H Drake-Brockman, Review of Coast to Coast 1963–1964 and The Tracks We Travel: Third Collection, Westerly, no 3–4, 1965, p 87.

32. D Hewett, ‘The wire fences of Jarrabin’, A Baker's Dozen, Penguin, Ringwood, 2001, p 55.

33. ibid., p 69.

34. B Attwood, Rights for Aborigines, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, 2003, chapters 6 and 11.

35. R Beynon, The Shifting Heart, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1960.

36. D Stewart, ‘Fence’, in Collected Poems, Angus and Robertson, Sydney, 1973, pp 156–57.

37. See Jane Landman, ‘Borders of the national family’, Studies in Australasian Cinema, vol 3, no 1, 2009, pp 61–73, for the ideology of the ‘Australian way of life.’

38. G Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. M Jolas, Beacon Press, Boston, pp 211–31.

39. T Winton, ‘Neighbours’, in Scission, McPhee Gribble/Penguin, Fitzroy/Ringwood, 1985, p 81.

40. See G Blainey, ‘The Asianisation of Australia’ Age, 20 March 1984, and discussion in A Markus, ‘The politics of race’, in D Gare et al., The Fuss the Never Ended: The Life and Work of Geoffrey Blainey, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, 2003, pp 102–13.

41. B Stannard and S Molloy, ‘Asians in Australia: more harmony than hatred’, Bulletin, 9 October 1984, 81. Ellipsis in original. I am grateful to Dr Zoe Anderson for alerting me to this article.

42. ‘The Fence’ was first published in B Coffey and W Jenkins (eds.), Portrait, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1986. It was written before the end of 1983, the year in which Kingdon died. Page references are to V Kalamaras, The Same Light, Fremantle Arts Centre Press, 1989.

43. B Bennett and S Hayes, ‘Introduction’, in Home and Away: Australian Stories of Belonging and Alienation, University of Western Australia Press, Nedlands, 2000, p 15.

44. The terms of this interpretation are drawn generally from M Douglas, Purity and Danger, Routledge, London, 2002, and J Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. L Roudiez, Columbia University Press, 1982.

45. Kalamaras, op. cit., p 43.

46. ibid., p 44.

47. J F MacCannell, Figuring Lacan: Criticism and the Cultural Unconscious, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 1984, pp 156–7.

48. Kalamaras, op. cit., p 45.

49. Bennett and Hayes, op. cit., p 15.

50. Z Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1989, p 40.

51. P Wolfe, ‘Nation and MiscegeNation: Discursive Continuity in the Post-Mabo Era’, Social Analysis, vol 36, 1994, p 93.

52. G Casey, ‘The hole in the fence’, Bulletin, vol 74, no 3827, 17 June 1953, pp 20–1, 23.

53. Iser, op. cit. p 10.