The Australian Reifungsroman: Reading women’s ageing in Kate Grenville’s The Idea of Perfection and Dorothy Hewett’s Neap Tide

Women’s ageing processes raise important questions about the relationship between the body, the self, and society, but this topic has been widely ignored in Australian literature. The Australian Reifungsroman, through nuanced articulations of ageing women’s experiences of being doubly othered, shows itself to be a critical discourse that helps to break the cultural silence accorded to ageing women. This article aims to acknowledge the existence of the Reifungsroman in Australian literature while addressing questions around how this genre is employed in the Australian context, in order to actively engage with the topic of women’s ageing. Drawing on literary gerontology, this article examines Australian novelist Kate Grenville’s The Idea of Perfection (2000) and Dorothy Hewett’s Neap Tide (1999) from a feminist perspective, focusing on the literary representations of ageing women offered by these novels. In so doing, this article contends that the Australian Reifungsroman unsettles the dominant ideas about women’s ageing as negative and declining. Indeed, narratives such as these help to articulate ageing women’s agency by reconstructing new images of older womanhood.

Patrick White's Theatre: Australian Modernism on Stage, 1960–2018

One of the giants of Australian literature and the only Australian writer to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Patrick White received less acclaim when he turned his hand to playwriting. In Patrick White’s Theatre, Denise Varney offers a new analysis of White’s eight published plays, discussing how they have been staged and received over a period of 60 years. From the sensational rejection of The Ham Funeral by the Adelaide Festival in 1962 to 21st-century revivals incorporating digital technology, these productions and their reception illustrate the major shifts that have taken place in Australian theatre over time. Varney unpacks White’s complex and unique theatrical imagination, the social issues that preoccupied him as a playwright, and his place in the wider Australian modernist and theatrical traditions.