City Space and Urban Identity: A Post-9/11 Consciousness in Australian Fiction 2005 to 2011

Abstract

This thesis undertakes a detailed examination of a close corpus of five Australian literary novels published between 2005 and 2011, to assess the political, social, and cultural implications of 9/11 upon an urban Australian identity. My analysis of the literary city will reveal how this identity is trapped between layers of trauma which include haunting historical atrocities and inward nationalism, as well as the contrasting outward pull of global aspirations. Dead Europe by Christos Tsiolkas (2005), The Unknown Terrorist by Richard Flanagan (2006), Underground by Andrew McGahan (2006), Breath by Tim Winton (2008), and Five Bells by Gail Jones (2011) are uniquely varied narratives written in the shadow of 9/11. These novels reconfigure fictional notions of Australian urbanism in order to deal with fears and threats posed by 9/11 and the fallout that followed, where global interests fed into national concerns and discourses within Australia and resonated down to local levels. Adopting an Australia perspective, this thesis contextualises subsequent traumatic and apocalyptic trajectories in relation to urbanism and Australian identity in a post-9/11 world. As a cultural and political artefact based on literary analysis, this study captures a particular moment in time within the decade after 9/11, in order to contextualise political, social, and cultural implications upon a multi-layered Australian identity as reflected in the selected examples. To articulate this complexity, I forge an approach and methodology from the foundational framework of trauma theory, which brings together a constellation of traumas that resonate in collective or individual memory or are projected onto the Australian urban landscape. They include global terrorism and the legacy of settler colonial violence in Australia, as well as other mass-mediated catastrophes of the twenty-first century, which fed into a worldwide post-9/11 mood of anxiety that resonated on national and local levels within Australia. Although separate from each other, these traumas operate in a multidimensional matrix which I extend in the second part of this thesis to incorporate apocalyptic landscapes.