Tasmania’s Cupboard: Indigenous and Convict Australia in Carmel Bird’s Writing

Abstract

ABSTRACT The writings of Carmel Bird (Patrick White Award 2016) are a suitable literary canvas from which to explore a central concern in the work of a white Australian woman writer of Celtic descent: the need to reconcile herself with two dark chapters of Australia’s history; namely, the convict past and Indigenous genocide. This paper investigates Bird’s controversial focus on Australia’s – particularly Tasmania’s – past dispossession from her debut novel in 1985 to her present-day production. The use of exile, abjection, secrecy and what Julia Kristeva calls ‘the semiotic chora’ – together with different tropes such as Derrida’s crypt, incest, unpleasant corporeity and the neocolonial ghost – allows Bird’s subaltern voices to emerge and break the ‘great Australian silence.’