Space, anxiety and the politics of belonging in suburban Australia

Abstract

This thesis contains a critical component and a creative component, both of which take suburban Australia as their subject. It explores suburbia as a site that has been fundamental to Anglo-Australia's core identity but has now become increasingly complex due to migration. In both my critical and creative components I make the argument that suburbia is the space onto which Australians project their anxieties about a changing society in which they no longer feel they have much control. The thesis begins with a close look at theorists who take space and place as their subject including Henri Lefebvre, Edward Soja, Michel de Certeau and Walter Benjamin; and those who explore the idea of place as a source of anxiety rather than nostalgia, of rootlessness, exile and homelessness - particularly Anthony Burke, Ghassan Hage and Una Chaudhuri. I then use these theorists to inform a close reading of the texts The Tax Inspector (1991) by Peter Carey, An Elegant Young Man (2013) by Luke Carman, Norm and Ahmed (1968) and Normie and Tuan (1999) by Alex Buzo, and Blue (2012) by Pat Grant. The themes that I explore in relation to these texts include: the desire to return to a nostalgic white suburbia; the figure of the Australian who adopts an indigenous position as a way of claiming ownership over land and positioning the migrant as an invader; the act of walking as a method of claiming ownership and establishing borders in suburban spaces; asserting the uniqueness of the local in a globalised world; and the Australian tradition of the invasion novel which many of these texts belong to. My novel, A Brief History of the Boat, continues my critical research and extends on it. The novel is set during the Tampa 'crisis' and intimately explores one family's multigenerational reaction to that turning point in Australia's history. It takes a close look at the political and media rhetoric of this specific time period, while pointing to the fact that this same rhetoric has been used since early settlement to provoke anxieties about migration and our historical fear of invasion. Significantly the family who are the subject of the novel are bi-cultural. The family patriarch is an Italian migrant, Antonio, who came to Australia post-WWII, a time in which Australia was actually encouraging mass-migration, albeit only from European nations. Antonio's own fear of subsequent generations of migrants has allowed me to explore a subject not present in the texts I have analysed- the fact that many Australian migrants have also adopted the fear of migration that was formerly a White Australian preserve.

Date of Award	2015
Original language	English
Awarding Institution	Western Sydney University
Supervisor	Ivor Indyk (Supervisor)