Date of Award
2024
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (College of Arts and Science)
Schools and Centres
Arts & Sciences
First Supervisor
Associate Professor Camilla Nelson
Second Supervisor
Associate Professor Jane Stenning
Third Supervisor
Dr Meera Atkinson
Abstract
This thesis by creative practice comprises a novel titled ‘His Name is History’ and a dissertation that examines how the Joh Bjelke-Petersen era in Queensland (1968–1987) manifests itself as a spectral influence in Brisbane fiction. This era, and its legacy, is remembered with some hostility as a period of social and cultural repression (Evans, Ferrier, and Rickertt 2004; Finnane 2008; Wear 2002) and political corruption (Fitzgerald 1989). Through creative and critical research, I argue that the traumatic inheritance of Queensland’s violent colonial past (Bottoms 2013, Richards 2008) passes through the Bjelke-Petersen era to the cultural psyche as an absence and nostalgic hankering for an imaginary past, and that more alternative voices need to be heard. This spectral analysis is informed by my lived experience as a Queenslander in the Bjelke-Petersen era, and by psychoanalytical and cultural literary theory, from Abraham and Torok’s concept of intergenerational ‘crypts’ that contain traumatic experience in stories (1994), to Derridean hauntology (2012), and Mark Fisher’s ghosts that mourn and warn of lost futures (2014). An interdisciplinary review of writing about historical and political corruption in Brisbane during the Bjelke-Petersen period is followed by a close, hauntological reading of two texts, Jessica Anderson’s The Commandant (2009) and Trent Dalton’s Boy Swallows Universe (2018). Finally, the process of writing and revising through haunting, of working through mourning, is considered in the context of the creative project, drawing the critical and creative processes together.
‘His Name is History’ centres on the long and potholed friendship between Liz and Alessio (Al), who were part of a generation shaped by Joh Bjelke-Petersen’s tainted National Party reign over Queensland. Liz’s narrative shifts between the 1980s, 2001, and 2019, structurally embodying the hauntological concept of the novel and echoing the words of Queensland historian Raymond Evans (2007): “The present is merely a hinge upon which the past and future swing.” Al’s life and untimely death are entangled with subcultural Brisbane’s resistance to the Bjelke-Petersen era. Liz feels compelled to exhume this encrypted past, to make sense of it for her teenage daughter. The novel excavates Liz’s haunting by Al as both absence and a refusal to mourn loss, weaving the personal and political. Collectively, the critical and creative work asks these research questions: What are the ongoing personal, political, and cultural impacts of the Bjelke-Petersen era that haunt novels written in the shadow of this era? How might hauntology be used to creatively research and write such novels, drawing on lived experience of this era?
Publication Details
Vallis, C. (2024). His Name is History: The Spectral Afterlife of the Joh Bjelke-Petersen Era in Queensland Fiction [Doctor of Philosophy (College of Arts and Science)]. The University of Notre Dame Australia. https://researchonline.nd.edu.au/theses/433