Convicts, miners, and immigrants: 'A pile of paradoxes' and the legacy of Australian representations in Victorian fiction

In this dissertation, I argue that some of the most popular British nineteenth-century texts helped foster a legacy of uncertainty regarding the possibility of an Australian literary tradition. In the Victorian novels, especially the Victorian sensation novels, which represent colonial Australia, two antithetical narratives are at work. In one, the colonies are denigrated as a place of savagery, incivility, and sensational crime. Imbedded in this rhetoric, however, is often a counter-narrative that acknowledges the possibilities for the colonies to become something beneficial for both the colonists and the imperial center. The ambiguities and paradoxes inherent in these simultaneous positions tell us much about Victorian attitudes toward convict transportation, gold mining, and immigration. Writers of the period rehearsed and reconfigured these landmark episodes of the colonial era. In the process, they demonstrated how sensation fiction could be employed as a tool for defining the cultural and political space of the colonies. Given this context, we can better appreciate the artistic and political motivations inherent in contemporary Australian novels' rerepresentation of the nineteenth-century experience.; Chapter two explores the fundamental issue that gives reason and legitimacy to the use of sensational narratives: convict transportation. Chapter three examines how the gold fields were represented as a place for British men to gain wealth, assume different identities, shed troublesome pasts, and, perhaps, engage in criminal activity. Chapter four considers how Victorians judged the Australian immigrant experience as one that must be evaluated in hindsight, from the vantage point of having returned to Britain. Chapter five discusses how contemporary Australian fiction has rewritten the colonial era in order to expose the mechanisms by which British culture influenced the colonies. Authors examined in the dissertation include Dickens, Clarke, Trollope, Boldrewood, Wilde, Kingsley, Hardy, Malouf, and Carey.