DETAILS
Wednesday 9th July 2025 at 4:30pm (AEST), 7:30am (IST)
Frances Devlin-Glass, Deakin University
Counter-Cultural Truth-Telling in Furphy’s Fiction and Bulletin ‘Pars’
ABSTRACT
From his first ‘pars’ (short contributions) for the Bulletin, Joseph Furphy’s curiosity about Aboriginal ethnology and languages is continuous and subtly counter-cultural. Joseph Furphy’s The Buln-Buln and the Brolga (1948) stages the meeting in Echuca between the urban authoress and the bushmen and their talk is a reminder of a frontier which by the early twentieth century was increasingly in retreat, vicious, secretive and remote. The Palmer River with its atrocities is a long way from the more passive though shocking decade during which Indigenous communities in the Port Phillip District were all but annihilated in the 1840s as the result of illness and internecine tribal warfare ( an instantiation of which Furphy witnessed as a child in the Yarra Valley). This latter event haunted him throughout his writing career and he returned to this singular experience at least twice in his prose. Furthermore and more generally, his fiction exemplifies him to be conflicted by the completing claims of polygenism and monogenism throughout his writing career. Drawing on his Bulletin pars, Manuscript and Typescript of Such is Life, letters and the fiction, I track the increasing intensity of his focus on the displacement of, and violence towards, First Nations people.on the receding frontier and his representation of them as skilled and charismatic individuals in his fiction. An abridged version of this paper was delivered at the ASAL Vets mini-conference on 15 October 2024.
SPEAKER
Frances Devlin-Glass is an Honorary Associate Professor at Deakin University (Melbourne) and has worked since 1970 in the fields of Australian Literary Studies and Irish Literature, as well as Feminist literature and theory. She worked on the team annotating Joseph Furphy’s Such is Life and was the sole annotator of The Buln-buln and the Brolga. She co-wrote with Bill Ashcroft and Lyn McCredden Intimate Horizons: The Post-Colonial Sacred in Australian Literature. She has been an editor of JASAL (Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature) and is currently an editor of AJIS, Australasian Journal of Irish Studies. She has been Creative Director of Bloomsday in Melbourne, mounting full professional productions of original plays about and adaptations of James Joyce’s oeuvre annually since 1994.
LOCATION (In-Person and Online)
This free public seminar will be held in-person in the Jabiru Room at Newman College (enter via main gate and follow the signs), and streamed live online via Zoom. The Zoom room will be open 10 minutes before the scheduled start to give everyone time to connect. Please keep your microphone on mute for the duration of the talk. There will be time for questions at the end of the seminar. Please RSVP to Dianne.hall@vu.edu.au if you would like the zoom link.
RECORDING
A recording may be posted here after the seminar.
