Writing Australian Unsettlement ― Modes of Poetic Invention 1796-1945

This book rewrites the history of Australian literature as the rough beginnings of a new literacy. Farrell's investigations of the colonial, material page begins with Bennelong's letter of 1796, and continues through bushranger Ned Kelly's famous Jerilderie letter, Jong's Chinese-Australian phrase-chains, Harpur's proto prose poem, Dorothea Mackellar's coded diaries, Christopher Brennan-does-Mallarme (and collage), and ends with Mary Fullerton's quotation game "Bromide." Here you will find songs, letters and visual poems by Indigenous farmers and stockmen, the unpunctuated journals of early settler women, drover tree-messages and carved clubs, and a meta-commentary on settlement from Moore River (the place escaped from in The Rabbit-Proof Fence). The book borrows the figure of the assemblage to suggest the active and revisable nature of Australian writing, arguing against the "settling" effects of its prior editors, anthologists and historians. It resists offering a new canon, but offers instead an unsettled space in which to rethink Australian writing.

Michael Farrell received his PhD from the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is a poet with several books and chapbooks, including Cocky's Joy, the thorn with the boy in its side, and thempark.