15 - Autobiography

Summary

Spectres of autobiography

Australian autobiography is a spectre. It deals with those spectral categories of identity that shift in and out of discursive focus: subjectivity, Indigeneity, ethnicity, nationhood. And it has a spectral presence for Australian literary history, in which autobiography is simultaneously central and marginal. At its narrowest, the term covers a small body of literature, taking until the 1960s to achieve historical significance, only to then quickly become inadequate to cover the full range of autobiographical practices available to contemporary writers. Broadly defined, however, autobiography is nothing less than the source of Australian literature, the pre-eminent mode of colonial writers, canonical fiction writers (such as Franklin, Furphy, and Richardson), Indigenous writers, minority writers, refugees, and lyric poets. Another way in which we can think of autobiography as spectral is its association with expressions of the uncanny (the unsettling interplay of the familiar and the unfamiliar) and ongoing crisis. These terms – spectres, the uncanny, crisis – will underpin this discussion of Australian autobiography from earliest times to the present.

Autobiography is a word that neither the Indigenous population of Australia nor (probably) those sailing on the First Fleet would have understood in 1788. As Robert Folkenflik notes in The Culture of Autobiography (1993), isolated instances of the word appear in the late 18th century in England and Germany, but as a term for self-writing it remained secondary to ‘memoir’ until the 20th century. To discuss Australian autobiography before the 20th century is to evoke an apparition, since neither ‘Australia’ nor ‘autobiography’ properly existed before then.