Academic literature on the topic 'Australians – England – Fiction'

Since the education explosion in mid-nineteenth century England, when astute publishers began to capitalise upon a newly created and burgeoning market, Australia has always featured prominently in fiction aimed at children and adolescents. Those British children who initially made up the bulk of the reading audience for books set in Australia were eager to read episodic stories set in exciting countries far from home, and an Australian setting offered a glamorous backdrop for tales of high adventure. Moreover, it appears that while the nineteenth-century British reading public perceived Australia as an exotic place, then Queensland was quintessentially so. A disproportionate number of early tales about life in Australia is set in this colony, most often in the outback regions, but also in the vicinity of the coastal tropics. Nineteenth-century Queensland was viewed by the British, as well as by many Australians, as a remote outpost of Great Britain; it was commonly thought of as the least urbanised, the least “civilised”, the least industrialised and perhaps the most remote of all the regions of Australia. It was widely seen as an area of great and diverse (if also mysterious and desolate) natural beauty, of rural innocence as yet unpolluted by dark, satanic mills (even Brisbane was a sleepy, sprawling country town in picturesque contrast to the bustling southern cities of Sydney and Melbourne). Children's novelists capitalised on the mystique of Queensland, archetypal frontier colony, by creating a cluster of tales showing what it was like to be a Queensland kid.

Abstract Australia features in numerous Victorian novels either as a place of exile or a land of new opportunities, perhaps the most memorable image of the country having been presented in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861). Anthony Trollope’s writing, however, offers a much more extensive and complex presentation of Australian life as seen by a Victorian English gentleman. In his Australian fictions, including Harry Heathcote of Gangoil (1874), Catherine Carmichael (1878), and John Caldigate (1879), he presents Australia both as a land of new opportunities and as a place where social hierarchy as it is known in England is upturned and social boundaries either disregarded or drawn along different lines. The present article is concerned with the ways in which Trollope’s John Caldigate represents differences in the structure of English and Australian society, stressing the latter’s lack of a clear class hierarchy characteristic of social organisation “back home”. The society of Australia is presented as extremely plastic and mobile - both in terms of space and structure. Consequently, it can hardly be contained within a stiffly defined hierarchy, and it seems to defy the rules of social organisation that are accepted as natural and obvious in England. In Trollope’s fiction success in Australia depends to a large extent on hard work, ability to withstand the hardships of life with no luxuries, and thrift, and thus on personal virtues, but the author nevertheless suggests that it is defined solely by economic capital at the cost of cultural capital, so significant in England.

Henry George Lamond is no longer a household name, but he was once popular and widely known in Australia and overseas. An extremely prolific writer, he published fifteen books of fiction and non-fiction, and more than 900 essays and magazine articles in his lifetime. His essays and articles include writing in a wide range of subjects and genres, from romantic fiction to practical agricultural advice. He was perhaps best known for his animal-based books, including Horns and Hooves (1931), An Aviary on the Plains (1934a), Dingo (1945), Brindle Royalist (1946) and Big Red (1953a). These titles were popular in the United States, England and Australia. Some were translated into other languages, including German and French, and they even formed part of school curricula. His tales are set in the Australian landscape and are ‘littered with bush colloquialisms’ (Bonnin 2000).

Australian settler fiction and poetry stage shifting notions of temporality in relation to bushfires. The fire was an important plot device in settler writing, initially adding a touch of local colour for readers back home in England through stories of melodramatic rescue. However, by the end of the nineteenth century, understandings of fire had begun to change, as settlers began to learn that fires were not simply one-off catastrophes, but rather they were recurring phenomena. Underpinning my arguments with theories of affect, in particular Brian Massumi’s work on ‘fear of future fire’ and the philosopher Alexander Bain’s work on trauma, I argue that as settlers became increasingly conscious of the cyclicality of bushfires, their understandings of time and its relation to landscape altered. Realist writing responded to this deepening knowledge of the Australian environment, and instead of emphasizing the fleeting drama of a fire, fiction began to focus on its seasonal return. These stories and poems highlight the extreme vigilance that accompanies heightened knowledge and memories of the land. We see characters waiting for fires to arrive in scenes that are often agonizing in their slow pace, leaving them caught, as Barbara Eckstein expresses it, ‘between bushfire and approaching’ (Eckstein 2014, 256). Yet we also see bushfires, both actual and anticipated, accumulate memories of fires that have come before, and the devastation they have caused. Memory and nostalgia play important and complicated roles in attempts to mediate and manage the Australian landscape, exposing the fiction of a land that could be tamed or pastoralized to become just like the home settlers had left behind. Drawing on the fire historian Tom Griffiths’ notion of the amnesia that enables survivors of bushfires to return to the site of the blaze and to build anew, I examine representations of characters who doggedly rebuild their old lives. In particular, I consider the fraught nature of ‘willed amnesia’ or the denial of the reality that fire will return, while also considering connections between memory and place. Keywords: bushfires; memory; disaster; fear; Australian settler culture

In 1941 Ernestine Hill published My Love Must Wait, a biographical novel based on the life of navigator Matthew Flinders. In the same year, Eleanor Dark published The Timeless Land, imagining the arrival of European settlers in the Sydney region from the perspectives of multiple historical figures. In this article we examine how each author represents the important figure of Bennelong, a man of the Wangal people who was kidnapped by Governor Phillip and who later travelled to England with him. While both works can be criticized as essentialist, paternalist or racist, there are significant differences in the ways each author portrays him. We argue that Dark’s decision to narrate some of her novel from the point of view of Bennelong and other Indigenous people enabled different understandings of Australian history for both historians and fiction writers. Dark’s “imaginative leap”, as critic Tom Griffiths has termed it, catalysed a new way of thinking about the 1788 invasion and early decades of the colonization of Australia. The unfinished cultural work undertaken by these novels continues today, as demonstrated by subsequent Australian novels which revisit encounters between Indigenous inhabitants and European colonists, including Thomas Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), Richard Flanagan’s Wanting (2008), and Rohan Wilson’s The Roving Party (2011). Like Dark, these authors situate parts of their novels within the consciousness of Indigenous figures from the historical record. We analyse the diverse challenges and possibilities presented by these literary heirs of Eleanor Dark.

Jason R. Rudy, “Settled: Dorrit Down Under” (pp. 184–206) Although the conclusion to Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–57) finds the protagonists Arthur Clennam and Amy Dorrit comfortably situated in London, the novel’s long and meandering narrative entertains alternate possibilities. This essay considers the relation of emigration to British middle-class identity, both in the historical context of the 1850s and in the fictional world of Dickens’s novel. Australian free emigration, which saw a significant rise in the 1850s, serves as a limit case against which to test the significance of remaining at home in England. Little Dorrit is a novel that “settles” on a domestic life of bourgeois stability, but it arrives at this conclusion only after contemplating less-predictable futures abroad. Dickens himself considered emigrating to Australia while writing Little Dorrit, and the novel’s quiet conclusion reflects the author’s own conflicted resolution to forego life beyond British shores. Dickens’s novel ultimately suggests that Victorian middle-class stability depended at least in part on the rejection of economic possibilities abroad.

Historical fiction, a widely-read genre, continues to engender contradiction and controversy within the fields of literature and historiography. This paper begins with a discussion of the differences and similarities between historical writing and the historical novel, focusing on the way these forms interpret and represent the past. It then examines the dilemma facing historians as they try to come to terms with the modern era and the growing competition from other modes of presenting history. Finally, it considers claims by Australian historians that so-called “fictive history” has been bestowed with historical authority to the detriment of traditional historiography. The Fact/Fiction Dichotomy Hayden White, a leading critic in the field of historiography, claims that the surge in popularity of historical fiction and the novel form in the nineteenth century caused historians to seek recognition of their field as a serious “science” (149). Historians believed that, to be scientific, historical studies had to cut ties with any form of artistic writing or imaginative literature, especially the romantic novel. German historian Leopold von Ranke “anathematized” the historical novel virtually from its first appearance in Scott’s Waverley in 1814. Hayden White argues that Ranke and others after him wrote history as narrative while eschewing the use of imagination and invention that were “exiled into the domain of ‘fiction’ ” (149-150). Early critics in the nineteenth century questioned the value of historical fiction. Famous Cuban poet Jose Maria Heredia believed that history was opposite and superior to fiction; he accused the historical novel of degrading history to the level of fiction which, he argued, is lies (cited in de Piérola 152). Alessandro Manzoni, though partially agreeing with Heredia, argued that fiction had value in its “poetic truth” as opposed to the “positive truth” of history (153). He eventually decided that the historical novel fails through the mixing of the incompatible elements of history and fiction, which can lead to deception (ibid). More than a hundred years after Heredia, Georg Lukács, in his much-cited The Historical Novel, first published in 1937, was more concerned with the social aspect of the historical novel and its capacity to portray the lives of its protagonists. This form of writing, through its attention to the detail of minor events, was better at highlighting the social aspects than the greater moments of history. Lukács argues that the historical novel should focus on the “poetic awakening” of those who participated in great historical events rather than the events themselves (42). The reader should be able to experience first-hand “the social and human motives which led men to think, feel and act just as they did in historical reality” (ibid). Through historical fiction, the reader is thus able to gain a greater understanding of a specific period and why people acted as they did. In contrast to these early critics, historian and author of three books on history and three novels, Richard Slotkin, argues that the historical novel can recount the past as accurately as history, because it should involve similar research methods and critical interpretation of the data (225). Kent den Heyer and Alexandra Fidyk go even further, suggesting that “historical fiction may offer a more plausible representation of the past than those sources typically accepted as more factual” (144). In its search for “poetic truth,” the novel tries to create a sense of what the past was, without necessarily adhering to all the factual details and by eliminating facts not essential to the story (Slotkin 225). For Hayden White, the difference between factual and fictional discourse, is that one is occupied by what is “true” and the other by what is “real” (147). Historical documents may provide a basis for a “true account of the world” in a certain time and place, but they are limited in their capacity to act as a foundation for the exploration of all aspects of “reality.” In White’s words: The rest of the real, after we have said what we can assert to be true about it, would not be everything and anything we could imagine about it. The real would consist of everything that can be truthfully said about its actuality plus everything that can be truthfully said about what it could possibly be. (ibid) White’s main point is that both history and fiction are interpretative by nature. Historians, for their part, interpret given evidence from a subjective viewpoint; this means that it cannot be unbiased. In the words of Beverley Southgate, “factual history is revealed as subjectively chosen, subjectively interpreted, subjectively constructed and incorporated within a narrative” (45). Both fiction and history are narratives, and “anyone who writes a narrative is fictionalising,” according to Keith Jenkins (cited in Southgate 32). The novelist and historian find meaning through their own interpretation of the known record (Brown) to produce stories that are entertaining and structured. Moreover, historians often reach conflicting conclusions in their translations of the same archival documents, which, in the extreme, can spark a wider dispute such as the so-called history wars, the debate about the representation of the Indigenous peoples in Australian history that has polarised both historians and politicians. The historian’s purpose differs from that of the novelist. Historians examine the historical record in fine detail in an attempt to understand its complexities, and then use digressions and footnotes to explain and lend authority to their findings. The novelist on the other hand, uses their imagination to create personalities and plot and can leave out important details; the novelist achieves authenticity through detailed description of setting, customs, culture, buildings and so on (Brown). Nevertheless, the main task of both history and historical fiction is to represent the past to a reader in the present; this “shared concern with the construction of meaning through narrative” is a major component in the long-lasting, close relationship between fiction and history (Southgate 19). However, unlike history, the historical novel mixes fiction and fact, and is therefore “a hybrid of two genres” (de Piérola 152); this mixture of supposed opposites of fact and fiction creates a dilemma for the theorist, because historical fiction cannot necessarily be read as belonging to either category. Attitudes towards the line drawn between fiction and history are changing as more and more critics and theorists explore the area where the two genres intersect. Historian John Demos argues that with the passing of time, this distinction “seems less a boundary than a borderland of surprising width and variegated topography” (329). While some historians are now willing to investigate the wide area where the two genres overlap, this approach remains a concern for traditionalists. History’s Dilemma Historians face a crisis as they try to come to terms with the postmodern era which has seen unprecedented questioning of the validity of history’s claim to accuracy in recounting the past. In the words of Jenkins et al., “ ‘history’ per se wobbles” as it experiences a period of uncertainty and challenge; the field is “much changed and deeply contested,” as historians seek to understand the meaning of history itself (6). But is postmodernism the cause of the problem? Writing in 1986 Linda Hutcheon, well known for her work on postmodernism, attempted to clarify the term as it is applied in modern times in reference to fiction, where, she states, it is usually taken to mean “metafiction, or texts which are in some dominant and constitutive way self-referential and auto-representational” (301). To eliminate any confusion with regard to concept or terminology, Hutcheon coined the phrase “historiographic metafiction," which includes “the presence of the past” in “historical, social, and ideological” form (302). As examples, she cites contemporary novels The French Lieutenant’s Woman, The White Hotel, Midnight’s Children and Famous Last Words. Hutcheon explains that all these works “self-consciously focus on the processes of producing and receiving paradoxically fictive historical writing” (ibid). In the Australian context, Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang and Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish could be added to the list. Like the others, they question how historical sources maintain their status as authentic historical documents in the context of a fictional work (302). However, White argues that the crisis in historical studies is not due to postmodernism but has materialised because historians have failed to live up to their nineteenth century expectations of history being recognised as a science (149). Postmodernists are not against history, White avows; what they do not accept “is a professional historiography” that serves self-seeking governing bodies with its outdated and severely limited approach to objectivity (152). This kind of historiography has denied itself access to aesthetic writing and the imaginary, while it has also cut any links it had “to what was most creative in the real sciences it sought half-heartedly to emulate” (ibid). Furthering White’s argument, historian Robert Rosenstone states that past certitude in the claims of historians to be the sole guardians of historical truth now seem outdated in the light of our accumulated knowledge. The once impregnable position of the historian is no longer tenable because: We know too much about framing images and stories, too much about narrative, too much about the problematics of causality, too much about the subjectivity of perception, too much about our own cultural imperatives and biases, too much about the disjuncture between language and the world it purports to describe to believe we can actually capture the world of the past on the page. (Rosenstone 12) While the archive confers credibility on history, it does not confer the right to historians to claim it as the truth (Southgate 6); there are many possible versions of the past, which can be presented to us in any number of ways as history (Jenkins et al. 1). And this is a major challenge for historians as other modes of representing the past cater to public demand in place of traditional approaches. Public interest in history has grown over the last 20 years (Harlan 109). Historical novels fill the shelves of bookstores and libraries, while films, television series and documentaries about the past attract large audiences. In the words of Rosenstone, “people are hungry for the past, as various studies tell us and the responses to certain films, TV series and museums indicate” (17). Rosenstone laments the fact that historians, despite this attraction to the past, have failed to stir public interest in their own writings. While works of history have their strengths, they target a specific, extremely limited audience in an outdated format (17). They have forgotten the fact that, in the words of White, “the conjuring up of the past requires art as well as information” (149). This may be true of some historians, but there are many writers of non-fiction, including historians, who use the narrative voice and other fictional techniques in their writings (Ricketson). Matthew Ricketson accuses White of confusing “fiction with literariness,” while other scholars take fiction and narrative to be the same thing. He argues that “the use of a wide range of modes of writing usually associated with fiction are not the sole province of fiction” and that narrative theorists have concentrated their attention on fictional narrative, thereby excluding factual forms of writing (ibid). One of the defining elements of creative non-fiction is its use of literary techniques in writing about factual events and people. At the same time, this does not make it fiction, which by definition, relies on invention (ibid). However, those historians who do write outside the limits of traditional history can attract criticism. Historian Richard Current argues that if writers of history and biography try to be more effective through literary considerations, they sometimes lose their objectivity and authenticity. While it is acceptable to seek to write with clarity and force, it is out of the question to present “occasional scenes in lifelike detail” in the manner of a novelist. Current contends that if only one source is used, this violates “the historiographical requirement of two or more independent and competent witnesses.” This requirement is important because it explains why much of the writing by academic historians is perceived as “dry-as-dust” (Current 87). Modern-day historians are contesting this viewpoint as they analyse the nature and role of their writings, with some turning to historical fiction as an alternative mode of expression. Perhaps one of the more well-known cases in recent times was that of historian Simon Schama, who, in writing Dead Certainties (Unwarranted Speculations), was criticised for creating dramatic scenes based on dubious historical sources without informing the reader of his fabrications (Nelson). In this work, Schama questions notions of factual history and the limitations of historians. The title is suggestive in itself, while the afterword to the book is explicit, as “historians are left forever chasing shadows, painfully aware of their inability ever to reconstruct a dead world in its completeness however thorough or revealing their documentation . . . We are doomed to be forever hailing someone who has just gone around the corner and out of earshot” (320). Another example is Rosenstone’s Mirror in the Shrine, which was considered to be “postmodern” and not acceptable to publishers and agents as the correct way to present history, despite the author’s reassurance that nothing was invented, “it just tells the story a different way” ("Space for the Birds to Fly" 16). Schama is not the only author to draw fire from critics for neglecting to inform the reader of the veracity or not of their writing. Richard Current accused Gore Vidal of getting his facts wrong and of inaccurately portraying Lincoln in his work, Lincoln: A Novel (81). Despite the title, which is a form of disclaimer itself, Current argued that Vidal could have avoided criticism if he had not asserted that his work was authentic history, or had used a disclaimer in a preface to deny any connection between the novel’s characters and known persons (82). Current is concerned about this form of writing, known as “fictional history," which, unlike historical fiction, “pretends to deal with real persons and events but actually reshapes them—and thus rewrites the past” (77). This concern is shared by historians in Australia. Fictive History Historian Mark McKenna, in his essay, Writing the Past, argues that “fictive history” has become a new trend in Australia; he is unhappy with the historical authority bestowed on this form of writing and would like to see history restored to its rightful place. He argues that with the decline of academic history, novelists have taken over the historian’s role and fiction has become history (3). In sympathy with McKenna, author, historian and anthropologist Inga Clendinnen claims that “novelists have been doing their best to bump historians off the track” (16). McKenna accuses writers W.G. Sebald and David Malouf of supporting “the core myth of historical fiction: the belief that being there is what makes historical understanding possible.” Malouf argues, in a conversation with Helen Daniel in 1996, that: Our only way of grasping our history—and by history I really mean what has happened to us, and what determines what we are now and where we are now—the only way of really coming to terms with that is by people's entering into it in their imagination, not by the world of facts, but by being there. And the only thing really which puts you there in that kind of way is fiction. Poetry may do so, drama may do so, but it's mostly going to be fiction. It's when you have actually been there and become a character again in that world. (3) From this point of view, the historical novel plays an important role in our culture because it allows people to interact with the past in a meaningful way, something factual writing struggles to do. McKenna recognises that history is present in fiction and that history can contain fiction, but they should not be confused. Writers and critics have a responsibility towards their readers and must be clear that fiction is not history and should not be presented as such (10). He takes writer Kate Grenville to task for not respecting this difference. McKenna argues that Grenville has asserted in public that her historical novel The Secret River is history: “If ever there was a case of a novelist wanting her work to be taken seriously as history, it is Grenville” (5). The Secret River tells the story of early settlement along the Hawkesbury River in New South Wales. Grenville’s inspiration for the story emanated from her ancestor Solomon Wiseman’s life. The main protagonist, William Thornhill (loosely based on Wiseman), is convicted of theft in 1806 and transported to Australia. The novel depicts the poverty and despair in England at the time, and describes life in the new colony where Grenville explores the collision between the colonists and the Aborigines. McKenna knows that Grenville insists elsewhere that her book is not history, but he argues that this conflicts with what she said in interviews and he worries that “with such comments, it is little wonder that many people might begin to read fiction as history” (5). In an article on her website, Grenville refutes McKenna’s arguments, and those of Clendinnen: “Here it is in plain words: I don’t think The Secret River is history…Nor did I ever say that I thought my novel was history.” Furthermore, the acknowledgements in the back of the book state clearly that it is a work of fiction. She accuses the two above-mentioned historians of using quotes that “have been narrowly selected, taken out of context, and truncated” ("History and Fiction"). McKenna then goes on to say how shocked he was on hearing Grenville, in an interview with Ramona Koval on Radio National, make her now infamous comments about standing on a stepladder looking down at the history wars, and that he “felt like ringing the ABC and leaping to the defence of historians.” He accuses Grenville of elevating fiction above history as an “interpretive power” (6). Koval asked Grenville where her book stood in regard to the history wars; she answered: Mine would be up on a ladder, looking down at the history wars. . . I think the historians, and rightly so, have battled away about the details of exactly when and where and how many and how much, and they’ve got themselves into these polarised positions, and that’s fine, I think that’s what historians ought to be doing; constantly questioning the evidence and perhaps even each other. But a novelist can stand up on a stepladder and look down at this, outside the fray, [emphasis in original audio] and say there is another way to understand it. ("Interview") Grenville claims that she did not use the stepladder image to imply that her work was superior to history, but rather to convey a sense of being outside the battle raging between historians as an uninvolved observer, “an interested onlooker who made the mistake of climbing a stepladder rather than a couple of fruit-boxes to get a good view.” She goes on to argue that McKenna’s only sources in his essay, Writing the Past, are interviews and newspaper articles, which in themselves are fine, but she disagrees with how they have been used “uncritically, at face value, as authoritative evidence” ("History and Fiction"), much in contrast to the historian’s desire for authenticity in all sources. It appears that the troubles between history and fiction will continue for some time yet as traditional historians are bent on keeping faith with the tenets of their nineteenth century predecessors by defending history from the insurgence of fiction at all costs. While history and historical fiction share a common purpose in presenting the past, the novel deals with what is “real” and can tell the past as accurately or even in a more plausible way than history, which deals with what is “true”. However, the “dry-as-dust” historical approach to writing, and postmodernism’s questioning of historiography’s role in presenting the past, has contributed to a reassessment of the nature of history. Many historians recognise the need for change in the way they present their work, but as they have often doubted the worth of historical fiction, they are wary of the genre and the narrative techniques it employs. Those historians who do make an attempt to write differently have often been criticised by traditionalists. In Australia, historians such as McKenna and Clendinnen are worried by the incursion of historical fiction into their territory and are highly critical of novelists who claim their works are history. The overall picture that emerges is of two fields that are still struggling to clarify a number of core issues concerning the nature of both the historical novel and historiographical writing, and the role they play in portraying the past. References Brown, Joanne. "Historical Fiction or Fictionalized History? Problems for Writers of Historical Novels for Young Adults." ALAN Review 26.1 (1998). 1 March 2010 ‹http://scholar.lib.vt.edu/ejournals/ALAN/fall98/brown.html›. Carey, Peter. True History of the Kelly Gang. St Lucia, Qld: U of Queensland P, 2000. Clendinnen, Inga. "The History Question: Who Owns the Past?" Quarterly Essay 23 (2006): 1-72. Current, Richard. "Fiction as History: A Review Essay." Journal of Southern History 52.1 (1986): 77-90. De Piérola, José. "At the Edge of History: Notes for a Theory for the Historical Novel in Latin America." Romance Studies 26.2 (2008): 151-62. Demos, John. "Afterword: Notes from, and About, the History/Fiction Borderland." Rethinking History 9.2/3 (2005): 329-35. Den Heyer, Kent, and Alexandra Fidyk. "Configuring Historical Facts through Historical Fiction: Agency, Art-in-Fact, and Imagination as Stepping Stones between Then and Now." Educational Theory 57.2 (2007): 141-57. Flanagan, Richard. Gould’s Book of Fish: A Novel in Twelve Fish. Sydney: Picador, 2002. Grenville, Kate. “History and Fiction.” 2007. 19 July 2010 ‹http://kategrenville.com/The_Secret_River_History%20and%20Fiction›. ———. “Interview with Ramona Koval.” 17 July 2005. 26 July 2010 ‹http://www.abc.net.au/rn/arts/bwriting/stories/s1414510.htm›. ———. The Secret River. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2006. Harlan, David. “Historical Fiction and the Future of Academic History.” Manifestos for History. Ed. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan and Alun Munslow. Abingdon, Oxon; N.Y.: Routledge, 2007. Hutcheon, Linda. A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory Fiction. New York: Routledge, 1988. Jenkins, Keith, Sue Morgan, and Alun Munslow. Manifestos for History. Abingdon, Oxon; N.Y.: Routledge, 2007. Lukács, György. The Historical Novel. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983. Malouf, David. "Interview with Helen Daniel." Australian Humanities Review (Sep. 1996). McKenna, Mark. “Writing the Past: History, Literature & the Public Sphere in Australia.” Australian Financial Review (2005). 13 May 2010 ‹http://www.afraccess.com.ezp01.library.qut.edu.au/search›. Nelson, Camilla. “Faking It: History and Creative Writing.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 11.2 (2007). 5 June 2010 ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au›. Ricketson, Matthew. “Not Muddying, Clarifying: Towards Understanding the Boundaries between Fiction and Nonfiction.” TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses 14.2 (2010). 6 June 2011 ‹http://www.textjournal.com.au/oct10/ricketson.htm›. Rosenstone, Robert A. “Space for the Bird to Fly.” Manifestos for History. Eds. Keith Jenkins, Sue Morgan and Alun Munslow. Abingdon, Oxon; N.Y.: Routledge, 2007. 11-18. ———. Mirror in the Shrine: American Encounters with Meiji Japan. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988. Schama, Simon. Dead Certainties: (Unwarranted Speculations). 1st Vintage Books ed. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Slotkin, Richard. “Fiction for the Purposes of History.” Rethinking History 9.2/3 (2005): 221-36. Southgate, Beverley C. History Meets Fiction. New York: Longman, Harlow, England, 2009. White, Hayden. “Introduction: Historical Fiction, Fictional History, and Historical Reality.” Rethinking History 9.2/3 (2005): 147-57.

IntroductionFilmed during a 1955 family trip from Perth to the Gulf of Carpentaria, Keith Adams’s Northern Safari showed to packed houses across Australia, and in some overseas locations, across three decades. Essentially a home movie, initially accompanied by live commentary and subsequently by a homemade sound track, it tapped into audiences’ sense of Australia’s north as a place of adventure. In the film Adams interacts with the animals of northern Australia (often by killing them), and while by 1971 the violence apparent in the film was attracting criticism in letters to newspapers, the film remained popular through to the mid-1980s, and was later shown on television in Australia and the United States (Cowan 2; Adams, Crocodile Safari Man 261). A DVD is at present available for purchase from the website of the same name (Northern Safari). Adams and his supporters credited the film’s success to the rugged and adventurous landscape of northern Australia (Northeast vii), characterised by dangerous animals, including venomous spiders, sharks and crocodiles (see Adams, “Aussie”; “Crocodile”). The notion of Australia’s north as a place of rugged adventure was not born with Adams’s film, and that film was certainly not the last production to exploit the region and its wildlife as a source of excitement. Rather, Northern Safari belongs to a long list of adventure narratives whose hunting exploits have helped define the north of Australian as a distinct region and contrast it with the temperate south where most Australians make their lives.This article explores the connection between adventure in Australia’s north and the large animals of the region. Adams’s film capitalised on popular interest in natural history, but his film is only one link in a chain of representations of the Australian north as a place of dangerous and charismatic megafauna. While over time interest shifted from being largely concentrated on the presence of buffalo in the Northern Territory to a fascination with the saltwater crocodiles found more widely in northern Australia that interest in dangerous prey animals is significant to Australia’s northern imaginary.The Northern Safari before AdamsNorthern Australia gained a reputation for rugged, masculine adventure long before the arrival there of Adams and his cameras. That reputation was closely associated with the animals of the north, and it is generally the dangerous species that have inspired popular accounts of the region. Linda Thompson has recognised that before the release of the film Crocodile Dundee in 1986 crocodiles “received significant and sensational (although sporadic) media attention across Australia—attention that created associations of danger, mystery, and abnormality” (118). While Thompson went on to argue that in the wake of Crocodile Dundee the saltwater crocodile became a widely recognised symbol of Australia (for both Australians and non-Australians) it is perhaps more pertinent to consider the place of animals in creating a notion of the Australian north.Adams’s extended and international success (he showed his film profitably in the United States, Canada, England, Germany, South Africa, Rhodesia, and New Zealand as well as throughout Australia) suggests that the landscape and wildlife of northern Australia holds a fascination for a wide audience (Adams, Crocodile Safari Man 169-261). Certainly northern Australia, and its wild beasts, had established a reputation for adventure earlier, particularly in the periods following the world wars. Perhaps crocodiles were not the most significant of the north’s charismatic megafauna in the first half of the twentieth century, but their presence was a source of excitement well before the 1980s, and they were not the only animals in the north to attract attention: the Northern Territory’s buffalo had long acted as a drawcard for adventure seekers.Carl Warburton’s popular book Buffaloes was typical in linking Australians’ experiences of war with the Australian north and the pursuit of adventure, generally in the form of dangerous big game. War and hunting have long been linked as both are expressions of masculine valour in physically dangerous circumstances (Brennan “Imperial” 44-46). That link is made very clear in Warbuton’s account when he begins it on the beach at Gallipoli as he and his comrades discuss their plans for the future. After Warburton announces his determination not to return from war to work in a bank, he and a friend determine that they will go to either Brazil or the Northern Territory to seek adventure (2). Back in Sydney, a coin flip determines their “compass was set for the unknown north” (5).As the title of his book suggests, the game pursued by Warburton and his mate were buffaloes, as buffalo hides were fetching high prices when he set out for the north. In his writing Warburton was keen to establish his reputation as an adventurer and his descriptions of the dangers of buffalo hunting used the animals to establish the adventurous credentials of northern Australia. Warburton noted of the buffalo that: “Alone of all wild animals he will attack unprovoked, and in single combat is more than a match for a tiger. It is the pleasant pastime of some Indian princes to stage such combats for the entertainment of their guests” (62-63). Thereby, he linked Arnhem Land to India, a place that had long held a reputation as a site of adventurous hunting for the rulers of the British Empire (Brennan “Africa” 399). Later Warburton reinforced those credentials by noting: “there is no more dangerous animal in the world than a wounded buffalo bull” (126). While buffalo might have provided the headline act, crocodiles also featured in the interwar northern imaginary. Warburton recorded: “I had always determined to have a crack at the crocodiles for the sport of it.” He duly set about sating this desire (222-3).Buffalo had been hunted commercially in the Northern Territory since 1886 and Warburton was not the first to publicise the adventurous hunting available in northern Australia (Clinch 21-23). He had been drawn north after reading “of the exploits of two crack buffalo shooters, Fred Smith and Paddy Cahill” (Warburton 6). Such accounts of buffalo, and also of crocodiles, were common newspaper fodder in the first half of the twentieth century. Even earlier, explorers’ accounts had drawn attention to the animal excitement of northern Australia. For example, John Lort Stokes had noted ‘alligators’ as one of the many interesting animals inhabiting the region (418). Thus, from the nineteenth century Australia’s north had popularly linked together remoteness, adventure, and large animals; it was unsurprising that Warburton in turn acted as inspiration to later adventure-hunters in northern Australia. In 1954 he was mentioned in a newspaper story about two English migrants who had come to Australia to shoot crocodiles on Cape York with “their ambitions fed by the books of men such as Ion Idriess, Carl Warburton, Frank Clune and others” (Gay 15).The Development of Northern ‘Adventure’ TourismNot all who sought adventure in northern Australia were as independent as Adams. Cynthia Nolan’s account of travel through outback Australia in the late 1940s noted the increasing tourist infrastructure available, particularly in her account of Alice Springs (27-28, 45). She also recorded the significance of big game in the lure of the north. At the start of her journey she met a man seeking his fortune crocodile shooting (16), later encountered buffalo shooters (82), and recorded the locals’ hilarity while recounting a visit by a city-based big game hunter who arrived with an elephant gun. According to her informants: “No, he didn’t shoot any buffaloes, but he had his picture taken posing behind every animal that dropped. He’d arrange himself in a crouch, gun at the ready, and take self-exposure shots of himself and trophy” (85-86). Earlier, organised tours of the Northern Territory included buffalo shooter camps in their itineraries (when access was available), making clear the continuing significance of dangerous game to the northern imaginary (Cole, Hell 207). Even as Adams was pursuing his independent path north, tourist infrastructure was bringing the northern Australian safari experience within reach for those with little experience but sufficient funds to secure the provision of equipment, vehicles and expert advice. The Australian Crocodile Shooters’ Club, founded in 1950, predated Northern Safari, but it tapped into the same interest in the potential of northern Australia to offer adventure. It clearly associated that adventure with big game hunting and the club’s success depended on its marketing of the adventurous north to Australia’s urban population (Brennan “Africa” 403-06). Similarly, the safari camps which developed in the Northern Territory, starting with Nourlangie in 1959, promoted the adventure available in Australia’s north to those who sought to visit without necessarily roughing it. The degree of luxury that was on offer initially is questionable, but the notion of Australia’s north as a big game hunting destination supported the development of an Australian safari industry (Berzins 177-80, Brennan “Africa” 407-09). Safari entrepreneur Allan Stewart has eagerly testified to the broad appeal of the safari experience in 1960s Australia, claiming his clientele included accountants, barristers, barmaids, brokers, bankers, salesmen, journalists, actors, students, nursing sisters, doctors, clergymen, soldiers, pilots, yachtsmen, racing drivers, company directors, housewives, precocious children, air hostesses, policemen and jockeys (18).Later Additions to the Imaginary of the Northern SafariAdams’s film was made in 1955, and its subject of adventurous travel and hunting in northern Australia was taken up by a number of books during the 1960s as publishers kept the link between large game and the adventurous north alive. New Zealand author Barry Crump contributed a fictionalised account of his time hunting crocodiles in northern Australia in Gulf, first published in 1964. Crump displayed his trademark humour throughout his book, and made a running joke of the ‘best professional crocodile-shooters’ that he encountered in pubs throughout northern Australia (28-29). Certainly, the possibility of adventure and the chance to make a living as a professional hunter lured men to the north. Among those who came was Australian journalist Keith Willey who in 1966 published an account of his time crocodile hunting. Willey promoted the north as a site of adventure and rugged masculinity. On the very first page of his book he established his credentials by advising that “Hunting crocodiles is a hard trade; hard, dirty and dangerous; but mostly hard” (1). Although Willey’s book reveals that he did not make his fortune crocodile hunting he evidently revelled in its adventurous mystique and his book was sufficiently successful to be republished by Rigby in 1977. The association between the Australian north, the hunting of large animals, and adventure continued to thrive.These 1960s crocodile publications represent a period when crocodile hunting replaced buffalo hunting as a commercial enterprise in northern Australia. In the immediate post-war period crocodile skins increased in value as traditional sources became unreliable, and interest in professional hunting increased. As had been the case with Warburton, the north promised adventure to men unwilling to return to domesticity after their experiences of war (Brennan, “Crocodile” 1). This part of the northern imaginary was directly discussed by another crocodile hunting author. Gunther Bahnemann spent some time crocodile hunting in Australia before moving his operation north to poach crocodiles in Dutch New Guinea. Bahnemann had participated in the Second World War and in his book he was clear about his unwillingness to settle for a humdrum life, instead choosing crocodile hunting for his profession. As he described it: “We risked our lives to make quick money, but not easy money; yet I believe that the allure of adventure was the main motive of our expedition. It seems so now, when I think back to it” (8).In the tradition of Adams, Malcolm Douglas released his documentary film Across the Top in 1968, which was subsequently serialised for television. From around this time, television was becoming an increasingly popular medium and means of reinforcing the connection between the Australian outback and adventure. The animals of northern Australia played a role in setting the region apart from the rest of the continent. The 1970s and 1980s saw a boom in programs that presented the outback, including the north, as a source of interest and national pride. In this period Harry Butler presented In the Wild, while the Leyland brothers (Mike and Mal) created their iconic and highly popular Ask the Leyland Brothers (and similar productions) which ran to over 150 episodes between 1976 and 1980. In the cinema, Alby Mangels’s series of World Safari movies included Australia in his wide-ranging adventures. While these documentaries of outback Australia traded on the same sense of adventure and fascination with Australia’s wildlife that had promoted Northern Safari, the element of big game hunting was muted.That link was reforged in the 1980s and 1990s. Crocodile Dundee was an extremely successful movie and it again placed interactions with charismatic megafauna at the heart of the northern Australian experience (Thompson 124). The success of the film reinvigorated depictions of northern Australia as a place to encounter dangerous beasts. Capitalising on the film’s success Crump’s book was republished as Crocodile Country in 1990, and Tom Cole’s memoirs of his time in northern Australia, including his work buffalo shooting and crocodile hunting, were first published in 1986, 1988, and 1992 (and reprinted multiple times). However, Steve Irwin is probably the best known of northern Australia’s ‘crocodile hunters’, despite his Australia Zoo lying outside the crocodile’s natural range, and despite being a conservationist opposed to killing crocodiles. Irwin’s chosen moniker is ironic, given his often-stated love for the species and his commitment to preserving crocodile lives through relocating (when necessary, to captivity) rather than killing problem animals. He first appeared on Australian television in 1996, and continued to appear regularly until his death in 2006.Tourism Australia used both Hogan and Irwin for promotional purposes. While Thompson argues that at this time the significance of the crocodile was broadened to encompass Australia more generally, the examples of crocodile marketing that she lists relate to the Northern Territory, with a brief mention of Far North Queensland and the crocodile remained a signifier of northern adventure (Thompson 125-27). The depiction of Irwin as a ‘crocodile hunter’ despite his commitment to saving crocodile lives marked a larger shift that had already begun within the safari. While the title ‘safari’ retained its popularity in the late twentieth century it had come to be applied generally to organised adventurous travel with a view to seeing and capturing images of animals, rather than exclusively identifying hunting expeditions.ConclusionThe extraordinary success of Adams’s film was based on a widespread understanding of northern Australia as a type of adventure playground, populated by fascinating dangerous beasts. That imaginary was exploited but not created by Adams. It had been in existence since the nineteenth century, was particularly evident during the buffalo and crocodile hunting bubbles after the world wars, and boomed again with the popularity of the fictional Mick Dundee and the real Steve Irwin, for both of whom interacting with the charismatic megafauna of the north was central to their characters. The excitement surrounding large game still influences visions of northern Australia. At present there is no particularly striking northern bushman media personage, but the large animals of the north still regularly provoke discussion. The north’s safari camps continue to do business, trading on the availability of large game (particularly buffalo, banteng, pigs, and samba) and northern Australia’s crocodiles have established themselves as a significant source of interest among international big game hunters. Australia’s politicians regularly debate the possibility of legalising a limited crocodile safari in Australia, based on the culling of problem animals, and that debate highlights a continuing sense of Australia’s north as a place apart from the more settled, civilised south of the continent.ReferencesAdams, Keith. ’Aussie Bites.’ Australian Screen 2017. <https://aso.gov.au/titles/documentaries/northern-safari/clip2/>.———. ‘Crocodile Hunting.’ Australian Screen 2017. <https://aso.gov.au/titles/documentaries/northern-safari/clip3/>.———. Crocodile Safari Man: My Tasmanian Childhood in the Great Depression & 50 Years of Desert Safari to the Gulf of Carpentaria 1949-1999. Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 2000.Bahnemann, Gunther. New Guinea Crocodile Poacher. 2nd ed. London: The Adventurers Club, 1965.Berzins, Baiba. Australia’s Northern Secret: Tourism in the Northern Territory, 1920s to 1980s. Sydney: Baiba Berzins, 2007.Brennan, Claire. "’An Africa on Your Own Front Door Step’: The Development of an Australian Safari.” Journal of Australian Studies 39.3 (2015): 396-410.———. “Crocodile Hunting.” Queensland Historical Atlas (2013): 1-3.———. "Imperial Game: A History of Hunting, Society, Exotic Species and the Environment in New Zealand and Victoria 1840-1901." Dissertation. Melbourne: University of Melbourne, 2005.Clinch, M.A. “Home on the Range: The Role of the Buffalo in the Northern Territory, 1824–1920.” Northern Perspective 11.2 (1988): 16-27.Cole, Tom. Crocodiles and Other Characters. Chippendale, NSW: Sun Australia, 1992.———. Hell West and Crooked. Sydney: Angus and Robertson, 1990.———. Riding the Wildman Plains: The Letters and Diaries of Tom Cole 1923-1943. Sydney: Pan Macmillan, 1992.———. Spears & Smoke Signals: Exciting True Tales by a Buffalo & Croc Shooter. Casuarina, NT: Adventure Pub., 1986.Cowan, Adam. Letter. “A Feeling of Disgust.” Canberra Times 12 Mar. 1971: 2.Crocodile Dundee. Dir. Peter Faiman. Paramount Pictures, 1986.Crump, Barry. Gulf. Wellington: A.H. & A.W. Reed, 1964.Gay, Edward. “Adventure. Tally-ho after Cape York Crocodiles.” The World’s News (Sydney), 27 Feb. 1954: 15.Nolan, Cynthia. Outback. London: Methuen & Co, 1962.Northeast, Brian. Preface. Crocodile Safari Man: My Tasmanian Childhood in the Great Depression & 50 Years of Desert Safari to the Gulf of Carpentaria 1949-1999. By Keith Adams. Rockhampton: Central Queensland University Press, 2000. vi-viii.Northern Safari. Dir. Keith Adams. Keith Adams, 1956.Northern Safari. n.d. <http://northernsafari.com/>.Stewart, Allan. The Green Eyes Are Buffaloes. Melbourne: Lansdown, 1969.Stokes, John Lort. Discoveries in Australia: With an Account of the Coasts and Rivers Explored and Surveyed during the Voyage of H.M.S. Beagle in the Years 1837-38-39-40-41-42-43. By Command of the Lords Commissioners of the Admiralty, Also a Narrative of Captain Owen Stanley's Visits to the Islands in the Arafura Sea. London: T. and W. Boone, 1846.Thompson, Linda. “’You Call That a Knife?’ The Crocodile as a Symbol of Australia”. New Voices, New Visions: Challenging Australian Identities and Legacies. Eds. Catriona Elder and Keith Moore. Newcastle upon Tyne, UK: Cambridge Scholars, 2012: 118-134.Warburton, Carl. Buffaloes: Adventure and Discovery in Arnhem Land. Sydney: Angus & Robertson Ltd, 1934.Willey, Keith. Crocodile Hunt. Brisbane: Jacaranda Press, 1966.

I A sense of in-between shapes contemporary theoretical perspectives on identity through concepts such as fluidity, hybridity and diaspora. These concepts have traction when theorising global social and cultural orders characterised by ‘a delocalized transnation’. In this formation, Appadurai argues, ‘the formula of hyphenation (as in Italian-Americans, Asian-Americans, and African-Americans) is reaching the point of saturation, and the right-hand side of the hyphen can barely contain the unruliness of the left-hand side’ (803). Yet in the relatively monocultural space of Anglo-Celtic rural Australia, delocalised and hyphenated transnational identities tend to make their presence felt most strongly on television. Rather than fluidity, rigidity appears to be a more appropriate metaphor for reading the divisions in rural settler-Australian identity that function as ‘uneven, local attempts to make sense of the world’ (Gilroy 98). In Lismore on the north coast of NSW, for example, the relatively fixed notion of being “a local” maintains its power. Since returning to my home-town of Lismore in 1999 I have become particularly fascinated by the constant use of the word “local” in everyday conversation and in the local newspapers. When I share my fascination with students and colleagues, I am struck by the emotive engagement, both positive and negative, that the idea of being “a local” stimulates. That these students and colleagues have local knowledge of what it means to be “a local” is no doubt a factor in this emotion and engagement: being “a local” marks a divide in belonging and in the local social order. While there is ample literature regarding “the local” within the context of globalisation, “the local” in place-based and regional research, “local knowledges” in anthropology, or “the local” as metaphor for issues of subjectivity and self in feminism and postcolonial theory, literature on being “a local” is curiously sparse. A strong thread of scholarship comes from Hawai’i (for an example see Ohnuma). Conversely, in the Australian context I am aware of only one publication dealing specifically with the idea of being a local. In Ronnie’s Story, Richard Woolley analyses the performance of being a local at a pub in the Sydney suburb of Redfern. By telling first-person anecdotes about a long-term Redfern local, Ronnie, more recent arrivals position themselves in a local order of being local. Woolley’s analysis indicates the power and significance that the idea of being a local has in Australian society, even in places where populations are relatively fluid. Yet while performance may be one strategy for creating a local order, the key to a successful performance in Woolley’s analysis is a relation with an “authentic” local who has qualities not of fluidity, but of routine and rootedness. It is this latter sense of being local that has salience in Lismore. It functions as a benchmark for authenticity and acceptance. This sense of being “a local” deserves scrutiny because it carries the full weight of traditional settler belonging. In addition, being “a local” deserves careful unpacking because it is a category that excludes. Concealed within the idea is a racial and colonial discourse. An analysis of being local in Lismore reveals that not everyone can be a local and the conditions of acceptance are obscured. One criterion is, however, clear and discussable: if there is a question of one’s status as a local, conversation typically and quickly moves to duration of personal and ancestral residence. II “When I first came to Lismore twenty-five years ago, people told me it takes 25 years to become a local […]. My time’s up. I think I can safely say I’ve made it.” (Nora Vidler-Blanksby qtd. in Satherley) “All [the people I just mentioned were] born and bred in the area, plus John Chant, who has been here for 40 years, which makes him a local.” (Baxter) “[…W]hat I’ve come to understand is that you are never a local unless you are born here. […] I mean even after twenty-odd years people say [to me], well, you’re not a local.” (Irwin) Becoming local takes time: routine every day time spent on the ground. There is a notion here of connection between identity and a “patch of dirt”, of authenticity through autochthony, of a seed planted, of being a child of the soil, of coming from a place as distinct from a womb. Being local weaves identity and place together in this most intimate fashion. A local’s sense of identity emerges through time from a developing everyday personal relationship to place through a meld of history, community and geography (Miller 217). To come from outside Lismore, and move beyond being “just a blow-in” — an unannounced stranger blown off-course — the honorific must be earned through an infusion of soil into one’s blood. The period required for this metamorphosis is clearly open to question: 25 years, 40 years, forever. In a sense, locals were never not there. History begins with their arrival. III The stability of this reading of the local order rests on the concealment of an anxiety: an anxiety that settler autochthony is a fiction. Diffusion of settlers and dispersal of Aborigines was the reality of locals’ “settling”. Aborigines upset the signifying chain of local settler belonging at its source because a straightforward appeal to duration of residence is quickly undermined by 40,000 years of Indigenous tenure. This challenge to autochthony initiates a pre-emptive strategy of avoidance and concealment. The language of the settler “local”, articulated through history, community and geography of necessity excludes Aborigines. In de Certeau’s words “locals” define themselves within a ‘proper place’ — ‘a place appropriated as one’s own’ — ‘in a world bewitched by the invisible powers of the Other’ (1984: 36). An analysis of the use of the word “local” reveals how the idea of being “a local” stabilises local settler belonging through concealment. Local, in this usage, is an adjective doing the work of a noun. By becoming a substitute for the noun, the actual noun which “local” modifies is understood, elided, concealed. ‘So you’re “a local”, huh? A local what?’ we might ask. Turning to local newspapers reveals what the concealed noun is not. Within everyday settler discourse Aborigines cannot be noun-locals. To do so would pollute the proper place of “the local” with the Other. Instead, Aborigines are adjective-locals. In The Northern Star, Lismore’s daily paper, Digby Moran is described as a ‘local […] indigenous artist’ (Redmond). Bill Walker, the co-ordinator of the Bundjalung Nation Aboriginal Cultural Heritage Committee, is a ‘respected local identity’ (“Co-ordinator named”). These instances are illustrative of the repeated use of the term “local” as a regular adjective in reference to Aborigines. Local is a modifier of the nouns “artist” and “identity”, indeed a modifier that refers to an imagined boundary rather than to the land itself. Now and then there is a subversion of this order and someone will refer to an Aborigine as a ‘fair dinkum local’ (Opit). Nevertheless, a qualifier is required. Supporting evidence is needed for the Aboriginal claim to status as “a local” – a fair-dinkum local as opposed to a no-need-to-explain local. If there was a class of nouns to which “local” belonged, we would be justified in labelling them “dispossessives”. IV Being a local is a valued aspect of Australian culture and identity — an embodiment of care for community and place for the long term. In the contemporary moment, characterised in the media by accelerating cultural change and personal and national threat, the local represents tradition through apparently unchanging repetition that tourists, sea-changers and tree-changers seek as a refuge and solace. The locals might be said to offer a community of resistance and trust. The local stands within a clearing in a cluttered and threatening world. As I have attempted to argue, however, the local that is revealed in the light of the clearing contains concealment. As an adjective masquerading as a noun, “local” silences talk of the clearing of Aborigines and in the Aborigines’ place it silently installs the settler as original and autochthonous. As Heidegger writes, the ‘clearing in which beings stand is in itself at the same time concealment. […C]oncealment […] occurs within what is lighted. One being places itself in front of another being, the one helps to hide the other, the former obscures the latter, a few obstruct many, one denies all. […A] being […] presents itself as other than it is.’ (Heidegger 54) While there is much to value in being local, as an everyday contemporary practice of colonialism and exclusion it deserves careful attention and transformation. The transformation is clearly more than a task of defining and reinstating the noun that follows the adjective “local,” and instead requires an ontological earthquake of sorts for settler locals. How could the local order in Australia be otherwise than colonial? How might settler Australians be able to imagine the clearing they inhabit in a way that does not clear the land of Aborigines? Within these questions lies a possible ethics of location for settler Australians. References Appadurai, Arjun. “The Heart of Whiteness.” Callaloo 16 (1993): 796-807. Baxter, Reg. “Six Pack Not So Bad”. The Northern Star 17 Mar. 2004: 11. “Co-ordinator Named”. The Northern Star 18 Feb. 2004: 3. De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Gilroy, Paul. Between Camps: Race, Identity and Nationalism at the End of the Colour Line. Harmondsworth: Allen Lane, 2000. Heidegger, Martin. Poetry, Language, Thought. Trans. Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper & Row, 1975. Irwin, Ros. Personal communication with author [transcript from tape]. 26 Aug. 2003. Miller, Linn. “Belonging to Country — A Philosophical Anthropology.” Voicing Dissent, New Talents 21C: Next Generation Australian Studies 76 (2003): 215-23, 257-8. Ohnuma, Keiko. “Local Haole – A Contradiction in Terms? The Dilemma of Being White, Born and Raised in Hawai’i.” Cultural Values 6 (2002): 273-85. Opit, G. “Stand Up for the Fair Dinkum Local.” Byron Shire Echo 18 Nov. 2003: 9. Redmond, Renee. “The Perfect Backdrop for Local Artist.” The Northern Star 11 Jul. 2003: 5. Satherley, Zoe “Look Who Wants to Be Mayor.” The Northern Star 30 Jan. 2004: 3. Woolley, Richard. “Ronnie’s Story: Narrative and Belonging to Place.” TASA 2003 Conference. The Australian Sociological Association. University of New England, Armidale. 4-6 December 2003. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Garbutt, Rob. "Local Order." M/C Journal 7.6 (2005). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/08-garbutt.php>. APA Style Garbutt, R. (Jan. 2005) "Local Order," M/C Journal, 7(6). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0501/08-garbutt.php>.

Introduction Crime fiction is one of the world’s most popular genres. Indeed, it has been estimated that as many as one in every three new novels, published in English, is classified within the crime fiction category (Knight xi). These new entrants to the market are forced to jostle for space on bookstore and library shelves with reprints of classic crime novels; such works placed in, often fierce, competition against their contemporaries as well as many of their predecessors. Raymond Chandler, in his well-known essay The Simple Art of Murder, noted Ernest Hemingway’s observation that “the good writer competes only with the dead. The good detective story writer […] competes not only with all the unburied dead but with all the hosts of the living as well” (3). In fact, there are so many examples of crime fiction works that, as early as the 1920s, one of the original ‘Queens of Crime’, Dorothy L. Sayers, complained: It is impossible to keep track of all the detective-stories produced to-day [sic]. Book upon book, magazine upon magazine pour out from the Press, crammed with murders, thefts, arsons, frauds, conspiracies, problems, puzzles, mysteries, thrills, maniacs, crooks, poisoners, forgers, garrotters, police, spies, secret-service men, detectives, until it seems that half the world must be engaged in setting riddles for the other half to solve (95). Twenty years after Sayers wrote on the matter of the vast quantities of crime fiction available, W.H. Auden wrote one of the more famous essays on the genre: The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on the Detective Story, by an Addict. Auden is, perhaps, better known as a poet but his connection to the crime fiction genre is undisputed. As well as his poetic works that reference crime fiction and commentaries on crime fiction, one of Auden’s fellow poets, Cecil Day-Lewis, wrote a series of crime fiction novels under the pseudonym Nicholas Blake: the central protagonist of these novels, Nigel Strangeways, was modelled upon Auden (Scaggs 27). Interestingly, some writers whose names are now synonymous with the genre, such as Edgar Allan Poe and Raymond Chandler, established the link between poetry and crime fiction many years before the publication of The Guilty Vicarage. Edmund Wilson suggested that “reading detective stories is simply a kind of vice that, for silliness and minor harmfulness, ranks somewhere between crossword puzzles and smoking” (395). In the first line of The Guilty Vicarage, Auden supports Wilson’s claim and confesses that: “For me, as for many others, the reading of detective stories is an addiction like tobacco or alcohol” (406). This indicates that the genre is at best a trivial pursuit, at worst a pursuit that is bad for your health and is, increasingly, socially unacceptable, while Auden’s ideas around taste—high and low—are made clear when he declares that “detective stories have nothing to do with works of art” (406). The debates that surround genre and taste are many and varied. The mid-1920s was a point in time which had witnessed crime fiction writers produce some of the finest examples of fiction to ever be published and when readers and publishers were watching, with anticipation, as a new generation of crime fiction writers were readying themselves to enter what would become known as the genre’s Golden Age. At this time, R. Austin Freeman wrote that: By the critic and the professedly literary person the detective story is apt to be dismissed contemptuously as outside the pale of literature, to be conceived of as a type of work produced by half-educated and wholly incompetent writers for consumption by office boys, factory girls, and other persons devoid of culture and literary taste (7). This article responds to Auden’s essay and explores how crime fiction appeals to many different tastes: tastes that are acquired, change over time, are embraced, or kept as guilty secrets. In addition, this article will challenge Auden’s very narrow definition of crime fiction and suggest how Auden’s religious imagery, deployed to explain why many people choose to read crime fiction, can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment. This latter argument demonstrates that a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. Crime Fiction: A Type For Every Taste Cathy Cole has observed that “crime novels are housed in their own section in many bookshops, separated from literary novels much as you’d keep a child with measles away from the rest of the class” (116). Times have changed. So too, have our tastes. Crime fiction, once sequestered in corners, now demands vast tracts of prime real estate in bookstores allowing readers to “make their way to the appropriate shelves, and begin to browse […] sorting through a wide variety of very different types of novels” (Malmgren 115). This is a result of the sheer size of the genre, noted above, as well as the genre’s expanding scope. Indeed, those who worked to re-invent crime fiction in the 1800s could not have envisaged the “taxonomic exuberance” (Derrida 206) of the writers who have defined crime fiction sub-genres, as well as how readers would respond by not only wanting to read crime fiction but also wanting to read many different types of crime fiction tailored to their particular tastes. To understand the demand for this diversity, it is important to reflect upon some of the appeal factors of crime fiction for readers. Many rules have been promulgated for the writers of crime fiction to follow. Ronald Knox produced a set of 10 rules in 1928. These included Rule 3 “Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable”, and Rule 10 “Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them” (194–6). In the same year, S.S. Van Dine produced another list of 20 rules, which included Rule 3 “There must be no love interest: The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar”, and Rule 7 “There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better” (189–93). Some of these directives have been deliberately ignored or have become out-of-date over time while others continue to be followed in contemporary crime writing practice. In sharp contrast, there are no rules for reading this genre. Individuals are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction. There are, however, different appeal factors for readers. The most common of these appeal factors, often described as doorways, are story, setting, character, and language. As the following passage explains: The story doorway beckons those who enjoy reading to find out what happens next. The setting doorway opens widest for readers who enjoy being immersed in an evocation of place or time. The doorway of character is for readers who enjoy looking at the world through others’ eyes. Readers who most appreciate skilful writing enter through the doorway of language (Wyatt online). These doorways draw readers to the crime fiction genre. There are stories that allow us to easily predict what will come next or make us hold our breath until the very last page, the books that we will cheerfully lend to a family member or a friend and those that we keep close to hand to re-read again and again. There are settings as diverse as country manors, exotic locations, and familiar city streets, places we have been and others that we might want to explore. There are characters such as the accidental sleuth, the hardboiled detective, and the refined police officer, amongst many others, the men and women—complete with idiosyncrasies and flaws—who we have grown to admire and trust. There is also the language that all writers, regardless of genre, depend upon to tell their tales. In crime fiction, even the most basic task of describing where the murder victim was found can range from words that convey the genteel—“The room of the tragedy” (Christie 62)—to the absurd: “There it was, jammed between a pallet load of best export boneless beef and half a tonne of spring lamb” (Maloney 1). These appeal factors indicate why readers might choose crime fiction over another genre, or choose one type of crime fiction over another. Yet such factors fail to explain what crime fiction is or adequately answer why the genre is devoured in such vast quantities. Firstly, crime fiction stories are those in which there is the committing of a crime, or at least the suspicion of a crime (Cole), and the story that unfolds revolves around the efforts of an amateur or professional detective to solve that crime (Scaggs). Secondly, crime fiction offers the reassurance of resolution, a guarantee that from “previous experience and from certain cultural conventions associated with this genre that ultimately the mystery will be fully explained” (Zunshine 122). For Auden, the definition of the crime novel was quite specific, and he argued that referring to the genre by “the vulgar definition, ‘a Whodunit’ is correct” (407). Auden went on to offer a basic formula stating that: “a murder occurs; many are suspected; all but one suspect, who is the murderer, are eliminated; the murderer is arrested or dies” (407). The idea of a formula is certainly a useful one, particularly when production demands—in terms of both quality and quantity—are so high, because the formula facilitates creators in the “rapid and efficient production of new works” (Cawelti 9). For contemporary crime fiction readers, the doorways to reading, discussed briefly above, have been cast wide open. Stories relying upon the basic crime fiction formula as a foundation can be gothic tales, clue puzzles, forensic procedurals, spy thrillers, hardboiled narratives, or violent crime narratives, amongst many others. The settings can be quiet villages or busy metropolises, landscapes that readers actually inhabit or that provide a form of affordable tourism. These stories can be set in the past, the here and now, or the future. Characters can range from Edgar Allan Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin to Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade, from Agatha Christie’s Miss Jane Marple to Kerry Greenwood’s Honourable Phryne Fisher. Similarly, language can come in numerous styles from the direct (even rough) words of Carter Brown to the literary prose of Peter Temple. Anything is possible, meaning everything is available to readers. For Auden—although he required a crime to be committed and expected that crime to be resolved—these doorways were only slightly ajar. For him, the story had to be a Whodunit; the setting had to be rural England, though a college setting was also considered suitable; the characters had to be “eccentric (aesthetically interesting individuals) and good (instinctively ethical)” and there needed to be a “completely satisfactory detective” (Sherlock Holmes, Inspector French, and Father Brown were identified as “satisfactory”); and the language descriptive and detailed (406, 409, 408). To illustrate this point, Auden’s concept of crime fiction has been plotted on a taxonomy, below, that traces the genre’s main developments over a period of three centuries. As can be seen, much of what is, today, taken for granted as being classified as crime fiction is completely excluded from Auden’s ideal. Figure 1: Taxonomy of Crime Fiction (Adapted from Franks, Murder 136) Crime Fiction: A Personal Journey I discovered crime fiction the summer before I started high school when I saw the film version of The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. A few days after I had seen the film I started reading the Raymond Chandler novel of the same title, featuring his famous detective Philip Marlowe, and was transfixed by the second paragraph: The main hallway of the Sternwood place was two stories high. Over the entrance doors, which would have let in a troop of Indian elephants, there was a broad stained-glass panel showing a knight in dark armour rescuing a lady who was tied to a tree and didn’t have any clothes on but some very long and convenient hair. The knight had pushed the visor of his helmet back to be sociable, and he was fiddling with the knots on the ropes that tied the lady to the tree and not getting anywhere. I stood there and thought that if I lived in the house, I would sooner or later have to climb up there and help him. He didn’t seem to be really trying (9). John Scaggs has written that this passage indicates Marlowe is an idealised figure, a knight of romance rewritten onto the mean streets of mid-20th century Los Angeles (62); a relocation Susan Roland calls a “secular form of the divinely sanctioned knight errant on a quest for metaphysical justice” (139): my kind of guy. Like many young people I looked for adventure and escape in books, a search that was realised with Raymond Chandler and his contemporaries. On the escapism scale, these men with their stories of tough-talking detectives taking on murderers and other criminals, law enforcement officers, and the occasional femme fatale, were certainly a sharp upgrade from C.S. Lewis and the Chronicles of Narnia. After reading the works written by the pioneers of the hardboiled and roman noir traditions, I looked to other American authors such as Edgar Allan Poe who, in the mid-1800s, became the father of the modern detective story, and Thorne Smith who, in the 1920s and 1930s, produced magical realist tales with characters who often chose to dabble on the wrong side of the law. This led me to the works of British crime writers including Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Dorothy L. Sayers. My personal library then became dominated by Australian writers of crime fiction, from the stories of bushrangers and convicts of the Colonial era to contemporary tales of police and private investigators. There have been various attempts to “improve” or “refine” my tastes: to convince me that serious literature is real reading and frivolous fiction is merely a distraction. Certainly, the reading of those novels, often described as classics, provide perfect combinations of beauty and brilliance. Their narratives, however, do not often result in satisfactory endings. This routinely frustrates me because, while I understand the philosophical frameworks that many writers operate within, I believe the characters of such works are too often treated unfairly in the final pages. For example, at the end of Ernest Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Frederick Henry “left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain” after his son is stillborn and “Mrs Henry” becomes “very ill” and dies (292–93). Another example can be found on the last page of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four when Winston Smith “gazed up at the enormous face” and he realised that he “loved Big Brother” (311). Endings such as these provide a space for reflection about the world around us but rarely spark an immediate response of how great that world is to live in (Franks Motive). The subject matter of crime fiction does not easily facilitate fairy-tale finishes, yet, people continue to read the genre because, generally, the concluding chapter will show that justice, of some form, will be done. Punishment will be meted out to the ‘bad characters’ that have broken society’s moral or legal laws; the ‘good characters’ may experience hardships and may suffer but they will, generally, prevail. Crime Fiction: A Taste For Justice Superimposed upon Auden’s parameters around crime fiction, are his ideas of the law in the real world and how such laws are interwoven with the Christian-based system of ethics. This can be seen in Auden’s listing of three classes of crime: “(a) offenses against God and one’s neighbor or neighbors; (b) offenses against God and society; (c) offenses against God” (407). Murder, in Auden’s opinion, is a class (b) offense: for the crime fiction novel, the society reflected within the story should be one in “a state of grace, i.e., a society where there is no need of the law, no contradiction between the aesthetic individual and the ethical universal, and where murder, therefore, is the unheard-of act which precipitates a crisis” (408). Additionally, in the crime novel “as in its mirror image, the Quest for the Grail, maps (the ritual of space) and timetables (the ritual of time) are desirable. Nature should reflect its human inhabitants, i.e., it should be the Great Good Place; for the more Eden-like it is, the greater the contradiction of murder” (408). Thus, as Charles J. Rzepka notes, “according to W.H. Auden, the ‘classical’ English detective story typically re-enacts rites of scapegoating and expulsion that affirm the innocence of a community of good people supposedly ignorant of evil” (12). This premise—of good versus evil—supports Auden’s claim that the punishment of wrongdoers, particularly those who claim the “right to be omnipotent” and commit murder (409), should be swift and final: As to the murderer’s end, of the three alternatives—execution, suicide, and madness—the first is preferable; for if he commits suicide he refuses to repent, and if he goes mad he cannot repent, but if he does not repent society cannot forgive. Execution, on the other hand, is the act of atonement by which the murderer is forgiven by society (409). The unilateral endorsement of state-sanctioned murder is problematic, however, because—of the main justifications for punishment: retribution; deterrence; incapacitation; and rehabilitation (Carter Snead 1245)—punishment, in this context, focuses exclusively upon retribution and deterrence, incapacitation is achieved by default, but the idea of rehabilitation is completely ignored. This, in turn, ignores how the reading of crime fiction can be incorporated into a broader popular discourse on punishment and how a taste for crime fiction and a taste for justice are inextricably intertwined. One of the ways to explore the connection between crime fiction and justice is through the lens of Emile Durkheim’s thesis on the conscience collective which proposes punishment is a process allowing for the demonstration of group norms and the strengthening of moral boundaries. David Garland, in summarising this thesis, states: So although the modern state has a near monopoly of penal violence and controls the administration of penalties, a much wider population feels itself to be involved in the process of punishment, and supplies the context of social support and valorization within which state punishment takes place (32). It is claimed here that this “much wider population” connecting with the task of punishment can be taken further. Crime fiction, above all other forms of literary production, which, for those who do not directly contribute to the maintenance of their respective legal systems, facilitates a feeling of active participation in the penalising of a variety of perpetrators: from the issuing of fines to incarceration (Franks Punishment). Crime fiction readers are therefore, temporarily at least, direct contributors to a more stable society: one that is clearly based upon right and wrong and reliant upon the conscience collective to maintain and reaffirm order. In this context, the reader is no longer alone, with only their crime fiction novel for company, but has become an active member of “a moral framework which binds individuals to each other and to its conventions and institutions” (Garland 51). This allows crime fiction, once viewed as a “vice” (Wilson 395) or an “addiction” (Auden 406), to be seen as playing a crucial role in the preservation of social mores. It has been argued “only the most literal of literary minds would dispute the claim that fictional characters help shape the way we think of ourselves, and hence help us articulate more clearly what it means to be human” (Galgut 190). Crime fiction focuses on what it means to be human, and how complex humans are, because stories of murders, and the men and women who perpetrate and solve them, comment on what drives some people to take a life and others to avenge that life which is lost and, by extension, engages with a broad community of readers around ideas of justice and punishment. It is, furthermore, argued here that the idea of the story is one of the more important doorways for crime fiction and, more specifically, the conclusions that these stories, traditionally, offer. For Auden, the ending should be one of restoration of the spirit, as he suspected that “the typical reader of detective stories is, like myself, a person who suffers from a sense of sin” (411). In this way, the “phantasy, then, which the detective story addict indulges is the phantasy of being restored to the Garden of Eden, to a state of innocence, where he may know love as love and not as the law” (412), indicating that it was not necessarily an accident that “the detective story has flourished most in predominantly Protestant countries” (408). Today, modern crime fiction is a “broad church, where talented authors raise questions and cast light on a variety of societal and other issues through the prism of an exciting, page-turning story” (Sisterson). Moreover, our tastes in crime fiction have been tempered by a growing fear of real crime, particularly murder, “a crime of unique horror” (Hitchens 200). This has seen some readers develop a taste for crime fiction that is not produced within a framework of ecclesiastical faith but is rather grounded in reliance upon those who enact punishment in both the fictional and real worlds. As P.D. James has written: [N]ot by luck or divine intervention, but by human ingenuity, human intelligence and human courage. It confirms our hope that, despite some evidence to the contrary, we live in a beneficent and moral universe in which problems can be solved by rational means and peace and order restored from communal or personal disruption and chaos (174). Dorothy L. Sayers, despite her work to legitimise crime fiction, wrote that there: “certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will some time come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks” (108). Of course, many readers have “learnt all the tricks”, or most of them. This does not, however, detract from the genre’s overall appeal. We have not grown bored with, or become tired of, the formula that revolves around good and evil, and justice and punishment. Quite the opposite. Our knowledge of, as well as our faith in, the genre’s “tricks” gives a level of confidence to readers who are looking for endings that punish murderers and other wrongdoers, allowing for more satisfactory conclusions than the, rather depressing, ends given to Mr. Henry and Mr. Smith by Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell noted above. Conclusion For some, the popularity of crime fiction is a curious case indeed. When Penguin and Collins published the Marsh Million—100,000 copies each of 10 Ngaio Marsh titles in 1949—the author’s relief at the success of the project was palpable when she commented that “it was pleasant to find detective fiction being discussed as a tolerable form of reading by people whose opinion one valued” (172). More recently, upon the announcement that a Miles Franklin Award would be given to Peter Temple for his crime novel Truth, John Sutherland, a former chairman of the judges for one of the world’s most famous literary awards, suggested that submitting a crime novel for the Booker Prize would be: “like putting a donkey into the Grand National”. Much like art, fashion, food, and home furnishings or any one of the innumerable fields of activity and endeavour that are subject to opinion, there will always be those within the world of fiction who claim positions as arbiters of taste. Yet reading is intensely personal. I like a strong, well-plotted story, appreciate a carefully researched setting, and can admire elegant language, but if a character is too difficult to embrace—if I find I cannot make an emotional connection, if I find myself ambivalent about their fate—then a book is discarded as not being to my taste. It is also important to recognise that some tastes are transient. Crime fiction stories that are popular today could be forgotten tomorrow. Some stories appeal to such a broad range of tastes they are immediately included in the crime fiction canon. Yet others evolve over time to accommodate widespread changes in taste (an excellent example of this can be seen in the continual re-imagining of the stories of Sherlock Holmes). Personal tastes also adapt to our experiences and our surroundings. A book that someone adores in their 20s might be dismissed in their 40s. A storyline that was meaningful when read abroad may lose some of its magic when read at home. Personal events, from a change in employment to the loss of a loved one, can also impact upon what we want to read. Similarly, world events, such as economic crises and military conflicts, can also influence our reading preferences. Auden professed an almost insatiable appetite for crime fiction, describing the reading of detective stories as an addiction, and listed a very specific set of criteria to define the Whodunit. Today, such self-imposed restrictions are rare as, while there are many rules for writing crime fiction, there are no rules for reading this (or any other) genre. People are, generally, free to choose what, where, when, why, and how they read crime fiction, and to follow the deliberate or whimsical paths that their tastes may lay down for them. Crime fiction writers, past and present, offer: an incredible array of detective stories from the locked room to the clue puzzle; settings that range from the English country estate to city skyscrapers in glamorous locations around the world; numerous characters from cerebral sleuths who can solve a crime in their living room over a nice, hot cup of tea to weapon wielding heroes who track down villains on foot in darkened alleyways; and, language that ranges from the cultured conversations from the novels of the genre’s Golden Age to the hard-hitting terminology of forensic and legal procedurals. Overlaid on these appeal factors is the capacity of crime fiction to feed a taste for justice: to engage, vicariously at least, in the establishment of a more stable society. Of course, there are those who turn to the genre for a temporary distraction, an occasional guilty pleasure. There are those who stumble across the genre by accident or deliberately seek it out. There are also those, like Auden, who are addicted to crime fiction. So there are corpses for the conservative and dead bodies for the bloodthirsty. There is, indeed, a murder victim, and a murder story, to suit every reader’s taste. References Auden, W.H. “The Guilty Vicarage: Notes on The Detective Story, By an Addict.” Harper’s Magazine May (1948): 406–12. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.harpers.org/archive/1948/05/0033206›. Carter Snead, O. “Memory and Punishment.” Vanderbilt Law Review 64.4 (2011): 1195–264. Cawelti, John G. Adventure, Mystery and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1976/1977. Chandler, Raymond. The Big Sleep. London: Penguin, 1939/1970. ––. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1950/1988. Christie, Agatha. The Mysterious Affair at Styles. London: HarperCollins, 1920/2007. Cole, Cathy. Private Dicks and Feisty Chicks: An Interrogation of Crime Fiction. Fremantle: Curtin UP, 2004. 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London: Random House, 1929/2004. ––. in R. Chandler. The Simple Art of Murder. New York: Vintage Books, 1950/1988. Hitchens, P. A Brief History of Crime: The Decline of Order, Justice and Liberty in England. London: Atlantic Books, 2003. James, P.D. Talking About Detective Fiction. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2009. Knight, Stephen. Crime Fiction since 1800: Death, Detection, Diversity, 2nd ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2010. Knox, Ronald A. “Club Rules: The 10 Commandments for Detective Novelists, 1928.” Ronald Knox Society of North America. 1 Dec. 2013 ‹http://www.ronaldknoxsociety.com/detective.html›. Malmgren, C.D. “Anatomy of Murder: Mystery, Detective and Crime Fiction.” Journal of Popular Culture Spring (1997): 115–21. Maloney, Shane. The Murray Whelan Trilogy: Stiff, The Brush-Off and Nice Try. Melbourne: Text Publishing, 1994/2008. Marsh, Ngaio in J. Drayton. Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime. Auckland: Harper Collins, 2008. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Penguin Books, 1949/1989. Roland, Susan. From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction. London: Palgrave, 2001. Rzepka, Charles J. Detective Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Sayers, Dorothy L. “The Omnibus of Crime.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1928/1947. 71–109. Scaggs, John. Crime Fiction: The New Critical Idiom. London: Routledge, 2005. Sisterson, C. “Battle for the Marsh: Awards 2013.” Black Mask: Pulps, Noir and News of Same. 1 Jan. 2014 http://www.blackmask.com/category/awards-2013/ Sutherland, John. in A. Flood. “Could Miles Franklin turn the Booker Prize to Crime?” The Guardian. 1 Jan. 2014 ‹http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jun/25/miles-franklin-booker-prize-crime›. Van Dine, S.S. “Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories.” The Art of the Mystery Story: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Howard Haycraft. 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This chapter provides an in-depth history of the international development of the crime genre prior to the twentieth century. The chapter traces the emergence of a transnational genre from the 1700s through legal narratives and Romantic preoccupations and aesthetics in France, Germany, England, the United States, the Scandinavian countries and Australia. While crime fiction scholars have traditionally maintained that the genre emerged in Britain and America, this chapter places doubt on the supposed centrality of the genre’s British and American genealogy. By examining the genre’s early transnational mobility, the chapter challenges the dominant perception that the genre’s transnationality is a consequence of twentieth- and twenty-first-century globalization and, as such, that it is largely a contemporary phenomenon.