Writing and portage: The post-settlement novel and the movement of things (David Malouf, Nadine Gordimer, South Africa, Michael Ondaatje, Australia)

The word “portage” describes both the labor of conveying things from one place to another and the things that merchants and travelers load onto ships and then carry over land when they reach their destination. This image is central to this dissertation, which examines the importance of the British goods that settlers took with them as they sailed to the colonies of Canada, South Africa, and Australia and built new homes and societies. Because these colonies were annexed primarily to enrich British trade, imported things were crucial not only to the physical and emotional lives of isolated and disoriented settlers but also to the ways in which the colonies came to imagine themselves and to formulate ideas about citizenship and independent nationhood, particularly in opposition to indigenous societies. The writing of explorers, missionaries, travelers, anthropologists, and settlers shows that between the British and those they sought to control and convert there is almost always a third term: the material form. As commercial cargo and personal effects moved across the oceans in unprecedented quantities, they become the material ambassadors of a distant home and the tools with which colonists attempted to make British culture portable.; By showing the centrality of exchangeable things to the development of national identity, the dissertation develops a framework for reading the novels of David Malouf, Nadine Gordimer, and Michael Ondaatje that is drawn from the largely-unexamined histories of settlement and reveals the singular questions such histories ask about the role of objects in the construction of human worlds and the invention of fictional ones. While much postcolonial theory is devoted to examining the intersubjective relationship between Europeans and the colonized, Writing and Portage argues that in the context of settlement the manner in which people revise and write about their understanding of themselves and others is inseparable from their attachment to things.