Insularity, Identity, and Alterity in Patrick White’s A Fringe of Leaves

In his novel A Fringe of Leaves (1976), Australian Nobel laureate Patrick White takes up the famous case of the 1836 shipwreck and subsequent survival on an island of Eliza Fraser, a Scottish woman who managed to return to white colonial society after having spent several weeks among a tribe of Aborigines in Queensland. White uses this story for an investigation of human processes of categorization as tools of the construction of notions of identity and alterity in contexts in which social, racial, and gendered otherness collide in the separateness of various insular spaces. In shaping the character of Ellen Roxburgh as Fraser’s fictional equivalent, he chooses a hybrid figure the liminality and the border-crossings of which lend themselves both to an investigation and a critical questioning of strategies of self-constitution dependent on imaginings of negative others. On a more concrete historical level, White thus questions the ideas of race, class, and gender early Australian colonial society was founded on and raises issues that are still of consequence even in the 21st century.

Chinese Engagement with the Australian Colonial Charity Model

This chapter examines the Chinese response to the need of the people of Victoria, in the southeastern corner of Australia, to continually raise funds to support their charitable institutions. Resolved to avoid the taxes associated with a state based system of caring for the sick, elderly and poor, the settlers of Victoria established institutions that required public support. Fund raising was a constant concern resulting in frequent public events for charities, such as processions, fairs and grand bazaars. Chinese communities generously participated in these events and proved to be great assets for fundraising committees. They fashioned a means to utilize western fascination with the splendor of aspects of Chinese culture, to serve Victoria’s need to support its charitable institutions. The costumes, and acrobatic and martial arts traditions of Cantonese opera were publicly displayed and demonstrated to extensive gatherings. Eventually the processing of a Chinese dragon was also used to attract crowds to charity events. Despite the restrictions that the host society placed on Chinese immigration the Chinese in Melbourne and various Victorian country towns readily expended considerable energy and money in responding to frequent calls for their involvement in charity events.

Gothic Secret Histories and Representing Australian Colonial Deaths at Sea: The Case of Captain Charles Wright Harris and the Wreck of the SS Admella (1859)

Extant ephemera documenting the wreck of the SS Admella off the South Australian coast on 6 August 1859 offers a compelling story of real-life maritime calamity characterized by death and extraordinary heroism. The much less written about account, however, is the story lying in between ‘official accounts’ of the wreck, and those that emerged in the contemporary reports of the day, including a body of verse termed ‘Admella poetry’. Verse forms and telegraphic reports of the wreck appear to be at odds with other witness statements, and official records have corrupted details from either telegraphic reports or published survivor statements, or both. This re-reading of one of the key heroic fatalities in the story of the wreck of the SS Admella – 37-year-old Captain Charles Wright Harris, a passenger aboard the Admella – theorizes on his death at sea as mapping plural histories. I argue that the account of the event preserved as political and bureaucratic memory – and its counterpoint – the account of the event preserved in the popular press and Admella poems, characterizes an alternative Victorian cultural memory, a gothic secret history concerning the wreck of the SS Admella and colonial deaths at sea.