Westerly 

Abstract: Let me begin by saying what I'm not going to do in this paper: I'm not going to do what used to be called a “close reading” of Tim Winton's Cloudstreet. I'm not going to wheel out a theoretical approach through which to interpret the text, as if the reading I could produce by that means were somehow more authoritative than any other. Instead, what I will do is situate Winton's career and this particular novel in what can be called the field of Australian literature. In using this term field, I mean to indicate the whole system involved in the production and reception of Australian literature. This is now a very broad spectrum of institutions, personnel, practices and values that is surprisingly complex and diverse. It is now so extensive that it isn't even confined to Australia. And academic literary criticism — in the sense of theoretically-driven textual analysis — is only one part of that field. Many would say that it's not even the most important part.

Abstract: The publication of David Malouf's Remembering Babylon met with an ambivalent reception.' The novel is a complex and often deeply moving narrative that vividly evokes the displacement, dispossession, uncertainties and anxieties of living in the border or contact zones in mid-nineteenth century Australia. Yet it radically divided literary critics, their divergent responses exacerhated by the socio-cultural context of its publication. This was in 1993, the International Yearof Indigenous Peoples, and one year after the momentous Mabo v. Queensland High Court ruling on native title. My own position in the ongoing debate is along the lines of Peter Otto's assertion that Malouf's text inscribes an "erasure of the political" through his literary translation of the "political into the psychological, and matters of history and politics into questions of creativity and aesthetics'? and in compliance with Suvendrini Perera's postcolonial critique of Malouf's protagonist as being centred within a "discourse of happy hyridisation".' However, rather than simply re-engaging with this debate, I want to offer a reading of the underlying theme of shame in Remembering Babylon, a subject that has so far been neglected in critical discussions of this novel.