The family members that Dorothy joins in Australia try to find her a good match, despite her opposition. Protection, financial issues and the age of the two potential suitors, Mr. Willis and Mr. Jocelyn, are criteria to be taken into account. The novel shows how women in Australia, outnumbered by men, could be the object of financial interest for a ruined settler, when Mr. Jocelyn decides to marry a wealthy woman instead. As for Dorothy, she is presented as completely detached from such financial considerations despite her humble origins, and after initial disappointment in her first suitor, she gradually comes to love Mr. Willis. Her sister Theresa rejoices at the news that Dorothy has not married for financial reasons, but cannot help but think that it is good luck that the three sisters eventually found good—wealthy—matches.

Neither this first serial novel, nor the series of seven narratives, have been re-published since the 1870s, and they have rarely attracted the critics' attention maybe because of their apparent triviality. The fictional narratives studied in this chapter therefore remain unpublished in book form today, even though they deserve being made more widely accessible, read and studied, as they shed light on a prominent yet forgotten colonial Australian woman writer. Furthermore, these narratives, being the first written by Cambridge when she had just settled in Australia, prefigure the rest of Cambridge's fiction, notably her concern for the difficulty of recreating a place that could be called "home" on the other side of the world, thus conveying the complexity of the exile's experience in relation to home.

This article aims to analyse the meaning of "home" in Ada Cambridge's colonial first narratives written in Australia, presented above, in the light of her memoirs of her first years spent in Victoria, *Thirty Years in Australia*, in order to show the inherent tension in narratives that attempt to construct a fictional representation of "home" in a context in which its very meaning was shifting, elusive, constantly changing. If the colonial home remains an elusive notion, the experience of the exile remains an in-between one, even if fiction can be used to bridge the gap between the two cultural referents of home, Britain and Australia. Yet the disruption of home is also familial and marital, all the more so for colonial women, which threatens the attempt at finding both a cultural and familial place of belonging.
The family members that Dorothy joins in Australia try to find her a good match, despite her opposition. Protection, financial issues and the age of the two potential suitors, Mr. Willis and Mr. Jocelyn, are criteria to be taken into account. The novel shows how women in Australia, outnumbered by men, could be the object of financial interest for a ruined settler, when Mr. Jocelyn decides to marry a wealthy woman instead. As for Dorothy, she is presented as completely detached from such financial considerations despite her humble origins, and after initial disappointment in her first suitor, she gradually comes to love Mr. Willis. Her sister Theresa rejoices at the news that Dorothy has not married for financial reasons, but cannot help but think that it is good luck that the three sisters eventually found good—wealthy—matches.

Neither this first serial novel, nor the series of seven narratives, have been re-published since the 1870s, and they have rarely attracted the critics' attention maybe because of their apparent triviality. The fictional narratives studied in this chapter therefore remain unpublished in book form today, even though they deserve being made more widely accessible, read and studied, as they shed light on a prominent yet forgotten colonial Australian woman writer. Furthermore, these narratives, being the first written by Cambridge when she had just settled in Australia, prefigure the rest of Cambridge's fiction, notably her concern for the difficulty of recreating a place that could be called "home" on the other side of the world, thus conveying the complexity of the exile's experience in relation to home.

This article aims to analyse the meaning of "home" in Ada Cambridge's colonial first narratives written in Australia, presented above, in the light of her memoirs of her first years spent in Victoria, *Thirty Years in Australia*, in order to show the inherent tension in narratives that attempt to construct a fictional representation of "home" in a context in which its very meaning was shifting, elusive, constantly changing. If the colonial home remains an elusive notion, the experience of the exile remains an in-between one, even if fiction can be used to bridge the gap between the two cultural referents of home, Britain and Australia. Yet the disruption of home is also familial and marital, all the more so for colonial women, which threatens the attempt at finding both a cultural and familial place of belonging.
# 1. The Elusive Colonial Home

I knew nothing whatever of Australia when I rashly consented to marry a young man who had irrevocably bound himself to go and live there, and, moreover, to go within three months of the day on which the wild idea occurred to me. (Thirty Years 1)

Ada Cambridge's life changed dramatically in 1870 when, aged twenty-six, she married the Anglican clergyman George Frederick Cross in Ely, Cambridgeshire. Cross was appointed to an Australian parish on their wedding day, with the departure due three months later. It is with the memory of this turning point, this uprooting, that Cambridge starts the first chapter of her autobiography. *Thirty Years in Australia*, which contains the recollections of her first Australian years, was published first as a serial narrative in 1902 in *The Empire Review*, a monthly British journal focusing on the ties between Britain and its colonies, thus highlighting that Cambridge's work also aimed at reflecting on her experience for a British readership. The memoirs would be published less than a year later in book form in London. For Cambridge, the initial—almost initiatory—departure for Australia seemed like a leap into the unknown. Having no idea what life in Australia was like, she tried to fill in the gaps in her knowledge by looking for information in local libraries. Her source of information turned out to be a novel, Henry Kingsley's *The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn* (1859). Cambridge doubted the lack of consistency with the Australian reality, but she turned to the story to feed her imagination: "*Geoffrey Hamlyn* was my sheet anchor, but did not seem to be supported by the scraps of prosaic history obtainable; we could not verify those charming homes and social customs" (Thirty Years 1). The reader's expectations needed confrontation with Australia. Young and confident, she was preparing for a life in which the unknown would be her ever-present fellow traveller. The young couple had promised to return to England five years later to visit their families—yet the return journey would not happen for financial reasons.

After a seventy-seven-day voyage from Plymouth, the description of their arrival in Australia is marked by a strong feeling of exile:
# 1. The Elusive Colonial Home

I knew nothing whatever of Australia when I rashly consented to marry a young man who had irrevocably bound himself to go and live there, and, moreover, to go within three months of the day on which the wild idea occurred to me. (Thirty Years 1)

Ada Cambridge's life changed dramatically in 1870 when, aged twenty-six, she married the Anglican clergyman George Frederick Cross in Ely, Cambridgeshire. Cross was appointed to an Australian parish on their wedding day, with the departure due three months later. It is with the memory of this turning point, this uprooting, that Cambridge starts the first chapter of her autobiography. *Thirty Years in Australia*, which contains the recollections of her first Australian years, was published first as a serial narrative in 1902 in *The Empire Review*, a monthly British journal focusing on the ties between Britain and its colonies, thus highlighting that Cambridge's work also aimed at reflecting on her experience for a British readership. The memoirs would be published less than a year later in book form in London. For Cambridge, the initial—almost initiatory—departure for Australia seemed like a leap into the unknown. Having no idea what life in Australia was like, she tried to fill in the gaps in her knowledge by looking for information in local libraries. Her source of information turned out to be a novel, Henry Kingsley's *The Recollections of Geoffrey Hamlyn* (1859). Cambridge doubted the lack of consistency with the Australian reality, but she turned to the story to feed her imagination: "*Geoffrey Hamlyn* was my sheet anchor, but did not seem to be supported by the scraps of prosaic history obtainable; we could not verify those charming homes and social customs" (Thirty Years 1). The reader's expectations needed confrontation with Australia. Young and confident, she was preparing for a life in which the unknown would be her ever-present fellow traveller. The young couple had promised to return to England five years later to visit their families—yet the return journey would not happen for financial reasons.

After a seventy-seven-day voyage from Plymouth, the description of their arrival in Australia is marked by a strong feeling of exile:
We, strangers in a strange land, sat apart and watched these favoured ones—listened to their callings back and forth over the ship's side, beheld their embraces at the gangway, their excited interviews in the cuddy, their gay departures into the night and the unknown, which in nearly every case swallowed them for ever as far as we were concerned. (Thirty Years 15)

The couple has not yet set foot on Australian ground that a feeling of solitude takes hold of them. The description of the other passengers' reunions with their friends and families reinforces their own feeling of exclusion, all the more so as Cambridge and her husband have no one to meet in Australia. Yet, the isolation makes room for excitement when the couple discovers Melbourne, subjugated as they are by a city that no book they have previously read has done justice to. Melbourne, worthy of its nickname—Marvellous Melbourne—is indeed “marvellous” for them: “No description that we had read or heard of, even from our fellow-passengers whose homes were there, had prepared us for the wonder that Melbourne was to us” (Thirty Years 18). More precisely, “Marvellous Melbourne” is the nickname given to the city after the gold rush in Victoria in the 1850s. The modernity of Melbourne, contrasting with the descriptions of a savage Australia that Ada Cambridge had read, is a striking feature for Cambridge when she arrives in Melbourne:

> As I remember the metropolis then, and see it now, I am not conscious of any striking general change, although, of course, the changes in detail are innumerable. It was a greater city for its age thirty years ago than it is today, great as it is today. I lately read in some English magazine the statement that tree-stumps—likewise, if I mistake not, kangaroos—were features of Collins Street ‘twenty-five years ago’. I can answer for it that in 1870 it was excellently paved and macadamised, thronged with its waggonette-cabs, omnibuses, and private carriages—a perfectly good and proper street, except for its open drainage gutters [...] (Thirty Years 18)
We, strangers in a strange land, sat apart and watched these favoured ones—listened to their callings back and forth over the ship's side, beheld their embraces at the gangway, their excited interviews in the cuddy, their gay departures into the night and the unknown, which in nearly every case swallowed them for ever as far as we were concerned. (Thirty Years 15)

The couple has not yet set foot on Australian ground that a feeling of solitude takes hold of them. The description of the other passengers' reunions with their friends and families reinforces their own feeling of exclusion, all the more so as Cambridge and her husband have no one to meet in Australia. Yet, the isolation makes room for excitement when the couple discovers Melbourne, subjugated as they are by a city that no book they have previously read has done justice to. Melbourne, worthy of its nickname—Marvellous Melbourne—is indeed “marvellous” for them: “No description that we had read or heard of, even from our fellow-passengers whose homes were there, had prepared us for the wonder that Melbourne was to us” (Thirty Years 18). More precisely, “Marvellous Melbourne” is the nickname given to the city after the gold rush in Victoria in the 1850s. The modernity of Melbourne, contrasting with the descriptions of a savage Australia that Ada Cambridge had read, is a striking feature for Cambridge when she arrives in Melbourne:

> As I remember the metropolis then, and see it now, I am not conscious of any striking general change, although, of course, the changes in detail are innumerable. It was a greater city for its age thirty years ago than it is today, great as it is today. I lately read in some English magazine the statement that tree-stumps—likewise, if I mistake not, kangaroos—were features of Collins Street ‘twenty-five years ago’. I can answer for it that in 1870 it was excellently paved and macadamised, thronged with its waggonette-cabs, omnibuses, and private carriages—a perfectly good and proper street, except for its open drainage gutters [...] (Thirty Years 18)
On the comparison between places in the colonial context, Bill Ashcroft, Graham Griffiths and Gareth Griffiths point out that “Victorian Britain had exulted in the disparateness of its empire, but in representing that empire predominantly as a site of the exotic, of adventure and exploitation, it had defined it as a contrastive element within the British world-view” (18). In this light, Ada Cambridge’s perception of Melbourne relies on the colonial binary opposition between England and Australia, while her description portrays Melbourne as a place of culture and a reminder of home in Britain. Eight days later, the couple leaves the city on their first trip across rural Australia, into the bush. Cambridge defines the bush in a plain manner for her British readership who might not have been familiar with the term, reminding them of the specificities of Australia compared to Britain:

> When I speak of the Bush, it is understood that I do not mean a place of bushes. The term, with us, is equivalent to "the country"—the country generally, though particularly and originally its uncultivated parts. (*Thirty Years* 72)

Through the use of the comparison between the Australian “bush” and the British “country,” Ada Cambridge relates to her British readers, but on the other hand, by using the pronoun “us,” thus echoing the colonial opposition “Us Vs. Them” but subverting it as the “us” does not refer to the British motherland but to the Australian colony, Cambridge defines herself as belonging to Australia. Cambridge would spend her first Australian years in the Victorian bush, retaining a strong feeling of attachment for this environment even after moving back to the city.

Nonetheless, the description that Cambridge makes in retrospect of her thirty years spent in Australia is not to be considered as a conclusive source of information on her colonial experience and her writing activity. As underlined by the authors of her biography, Margaret Bradstock and Louise Wakeling, the autobiography, far from reflecting "the absolute 'truth' of a life" can be no more than a reconstruction of often "conflicting realities" (xvi). Yet Cambridge's narrative enables us to grasp the tension between her faithfulness to her home England—in the sense of "native"
On the comparison between places in the colonial context, Bill Ashcroft, Graham Griffiths and Gareth Griffiths point out that “Victorian Britain had exulted in the disparateness of its empire, but in representing that empire predominantly as a site of the exotic, of adventure and exploitation, it had defined it as a contrastive element within the British world-view” (18). In this light, Ada Cambridge’s perception of Melbourne relies on the colonial binary opposition between England and Australia, while her description portrays Melbourne as a place of culture and a reminder of home in Britain. Eight days later, the couple leaves the city on their first trip across rural Australia, into the bush. Cambridge defines the bush in a plain manner for her British readership who might not have been familiar with the term, reminding them of the specificities of Australia compared to Britain:

> When I speak of the Bush, it is understood that I do not mean a place of bushes. The term, with us, is equivalent to "the country"—the country generally, though particularly and originally its uncultivated parts. (*Thirty Years* 72)

Through the use of the comparison between the Australian “bush” and the British “country,” Ada Cambridge relates to her British readers, but on the other hand, by using the pronoun “us,” thus echoing the colonial opposition “Us Vs. Them” but subverting it as the “us” does not refer to the British motherland but to the Australian colony, Cambridge defines herself as belonging to Australia. Cambridge would spend her first Australian years in the Victorian bush, retaining a strong feeling of attachment for this environment even after moving back to the city.

Nonetheless, the description that Cambridge makes in retrospect of her thirty years spent in Australia is not to be considered as a conclusive source of information on her colonial experience and her writing activity. As underlined by the authors of her biography, Margaret Bradstock and Louise Wakeling, the autobiography, far from reflecting "the absolute 'truth' of a life" can be no more than a reconstruction of often "conflicting realities" (xvi). Yet Cambridge's narrative enables us to grasp the tension between her faithfulness to her home England—in the sense of "native"
England—and her loyalty to her adoptive austral land. From the very beginning of her memoirs, the reader is indeed struck by the prevalence of the term “home.” The very structure of the autobiography reflects this concern for the instability of the referent of “home,” as the chapters follow each other at the pace of the different places where Cambridge settled. Each new location is presented without any geographical reference but only through a list repeating the word “home,” thereby insisting on its plural and shifting nature: “The First Home” (chapter IV), “The Second Home” (chapter VI), “The Third Home” (chapter VII), “The Fourth Home” (chapter X), etc., up to “The Eighth Home” (chapter XIX), the last chapter before the conclusion. Despite the ordinal and repetitive structure of the list, in which the titles, similarly constructed and articulated in a successive manner, are therefore dependent on one another, the accumulation of references to the different homes one after the other rather conveys an image of disjunction. Each time the couple moves out is a new start and an additional uprooting. The towns—the small parishes around Melbourne—quoted below are only referred to using their initials in Cambridge’s autobiography (“From here to W—is not distance as the crow flies”), reinforcing the instability of the home which lacks a geographical anchorage (Thirty Years 25).<fnref n="110" /> Cambridge started to settle in her first Australian home in Wangaratta, where the couple lived from 1870 to 1872, including moving out in the same parish. It would be followed by a high number of new locations, the couple successively settling in the mostly rural parishes of Yackandandah (from 1872 to 1874), Ballan (until 1877), Coleraine (until 1883), Sandhurst, present-day Bendigo (until 1885), Beechworth (until 1893), then Williamstown near Melbourne (until 1912). As such, the bush thus became Cambridge’s main home. The fragmentation of the landmarks, due to the fleeting aspect of the successive homes, was nonetheless in part compensated by the unity that the writer found in the bush, which became her new “world”: “The Bush ‘township’ became my world” (Thirty Years 72). The common point between the successive homes was the discovery of life in the bush, which occupied Ada Cambridge’s first Australian weeks, and the

<footnote n="110">¹¹⁰ Ada Cambridge’s biographer, Audrey Tate, has identified the full name of these locations (170).</footnote>
England—and her loyalty to her adoptive austral land. From the very beginning of her memoirs, the reader is indeed struck by the prevalence of the term “home.” The very structure of the autobiography reflects this concern for the instability of the referent of “home,” as the chapters follow each other at the pace of the different places where Cambridge settled. Each new location is presented without any geographical reference but only through a list repeating the word “home,” thereby insisting on its plural and shifting nature: “The First Home” (chapter IV), “The Second Home” (chapter VI), “The Third Home” (chapter VII), “The Fourth Home” (chapter X), etc., up to “The Eighth Home” (chapter XIX), the last chapter before the conclusion. Despite the ordinal and repetitive structure of the list, in which the titles, similarly constructed and articulated in a successive manner, are therefore dependent on one another, the accumulation of references to the different homes one after the other rather conveys an image of disjunction. Each time the couple moves out is a new start and an additional uprooting. The towns—the small parishes around Melbourne—quoted below are only referred to using their initials in Cambridge’s autobiography (“From here to W—is not distance as the crow flies”), reinforcing the instability of the home which lacks a geographical anchorage (Thirty Years 25).<fnref n="110" /> Cambridge started to settle in her first Australian home in Wangaratta, where the couple lived from 1870 to 1872, including moving out in the same parish. It would be followed by a high number of new locations, the couple successively settling in the mostly rural parishes of Yackandandah (from 1872 to 1874), Ballan (until 1877), Coleraine (until 1883), Sandhurst, present-day Bendigo (until 1885), Beechworth (until 1893), then Williamstown near Melbourne (until 1912). As such, the bush thus became Cambridge’s main home. The fragmentation of the landmarks, due to the fleeting aspect of the successive homes, was nonetheless in part compensated by the unity that the writer found in the bush, which became her new “world”: “The Bush ‘township’ became my world” (Thirty Years 72). The common point between the successive homes was the discovery of life in the bush, which occupied Ada Cambridge’s first Australian weeks, and the

<footnote n="110">¹¹⁰ Ada Cambridge’s biographer, Audrey Tate, has identified the full name of these locations (170).</footnote>
bush would become a main setting in her first fictional narratives. This focus on the Bush as the epitome of the Australian way of life reminds us of the nationalist, masculinist trend which developed at the end of the nineteenth century, led notably by the *Bulletin* writer, including Henry Lawson. Yet it is interesting to see the way Ada Cambridge's narratives offer another perspective on the bush, foregrounding the domestic realm rather than the notions of wilderness and mateship.

The term “home,” lacking any precise geographical reference in the structure of *Thirty Years in Australia*, thus refers to the connotation of the term as a private space in which an individual lives, attends to his or her personal activities, and can feel safe. In that sense, “home” refers to the household, a protective place for the family, away from the worries of the public sphere, according to the Victorian notion of the gendered separation of the spheres notably emphasised by John Ruskin: “This is the true nature of home—it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division.” According to this representation of the Victorian ideal of femininity, a woman had to take care of the household and the proper organisation of domestic tasks, while also embodying a moral force against the evils of society. The tight link forged between women and the household in part explains the importance of this theme in novels characterised as domestic, mainly written by women, and whose main events correspond to activities and concerns belonging to the private sphere.

The other very interesting meaning of the term “home” is that of the geo-cultural area which an individual is tied to. This meaning is prevalent in the novels of the colonial period, i.e. in novels belonging to a period of unprecedented emigration and global exchanges.<fnref n="111" /> The meaning of “home” thus goes beyond the domestic sphere, referring to one’s geographical and cultural place of belonging. For a British settler living in Australia, “home” could thus refer in turns to the Old Continent and the Australian colonies. In the first case, the term then implied “home-country,”

<footnote n="111">¹¹¹ The three most important groups of immigrants in Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century were the English, the Irish, and the Scottish. In 1854, there were about 100 000 English immigrants in the colony of Victoria. In 1871, there were about 100 400 Irish immigrants in Victoria. One out of four inhabitants in Victoria was Irish. The Scots were 36 000 in 1854, 60 700 in 1861—the highest number up to this day (“History of immigration from England”).</footnote>
bush would become a main setting in her first fictional narratives. This focus on the Bush as the epitome of the Australian way of life reminds us of the nationalist, masculinist trend which developed at the end of the nineteenth century, led notably by the *Bulletin* writer, including Henry Lawson. Yet it is interesting to see the way Ada Cambridge's narratives offer another perspective on the bush, foregrounding the domestic realm rather than the notions of wilderness and mateship.

The term “home,” lacking any precise geographical reference in the structure of *Thirty Years in Australia*, thus refers to the connotation of the term as a private space in which an individual lives, attends to his or her personal activities, and can feel safe. In that sense, “home” refers to the household, a protective place for the family, away from the worries of the public sphere, according to the Victorian notion of the gendered separation of the spheres notably emphasised by John Ruskin: “This is the true nature of home—it is the place of Peace; the shelter, not only from all injury, but from all terror, doubt, and division.” According to this representation of the Victorian ideal of femininity, a woman had to take care of the household and the proper organisation of domestic tasks, while also embodying a moral force against the evils of society. The tight link forged between women and the household in part explains the importance of this theme in novels characterised as domestic, mainly written by women, and whose main events correspond to activities and concerns belonging to the private sphere.

The other very interesting meaning of the term “home” is that of the geo-cultural area which an individual is tied to. This meaning is prevalent in the novels of the colonial period, i.e. in novels belonging to a period of unprecedented emigration and global exchanges.<fnref n="111" /> The meaning of “home” thus goes beyond the domestic sphere, referring to one’s geographical and cultural place of belonging. For a British settler living in Australia, “home” could thus refer in turns to the Old Continent and the Australian colonies. In the first case, the term then implied “home-country,”

<footnote n="111">¹¹¹ The three most important groups of immigrants in Australia in the second half of the nineteenth century were the English, the Irish, and the Scottish. In 1854, there were about 100 000 English immigrants in the colony of Victoria. In 1871, there were about 100 400 Irish immigrants in Victoria. One out of four inhabitants in Victoria was Irish. The Scots were 36 000 in 1854, 60 700 in 1861—the highest number up to this day (“History of immigration from England”).</footnote>
the original birthplace of the settlers. In the second case, it referred to
their adoptive land, that is the place where they had settled. The fleeting
nature of the referent of "home," in its geo-cultural connotation, underlines
the fact that this word rather refers to an imagined place than to a strict
geographical location. The term thus suggests the intersection of the
private and the public, of the individual and the community (George 11-12).
"Home" connotes a mental picture often associated with an emotional
representation and the fictional aspect is consequently inherent to this
notion, itself recurrent in literary narratives (George 11).<fnref n="112" /> Home thus
remains a polysemous notion, mirroring the experience of the British
settler in Australia, that of the exile in-between geographical and cultural
landmarks.

## 2. The In-Betweenness of Exile

Ada Cambridge's texts reveal her homesickness and nostalgia for
her native England, but they also demonstrate a gradual adaptation to the
Australian colonies. Indeed, in the absence of any possibility of physically
going back and forth between England and Australia, Cambridge moves
back and forth between these two points of reference in her fiction, to
make sense of the in-between experience of the exile. In a context in
which former cultural landmarks have been left behind while new ones are
not determined yet, the search for a stable home drives the characters
to go back and forth between England and Australia. For instance, in
the serial tales, Jim goes twice to Australia while Colonel Devereux, an
Englishman who has come to visit him, also makes the return trip. Another
instance is found in the serial novel "Up the Murray," in which the heroine
Dorothy leaves England for Victoria, consequently faced with the gradual
process of familiarisation with her new environment. When she arrives
in Melbourne, England and the colony are first constructed as opposed,
as shown in the dialogue between Dorothy and her stepbrother Heriot:

<footnote n="112">¹¹² Rosemary Marangoly George relies on Nancy Armstrong's statement in *Desire and Domestic Fiction: a Political History of the Novel*: "[the] most powerful household is the one we carry around in our heads" (Armstrong 251). George adds that the mental image is also important in our understanding of what makes "home," so much so that most people are, according to her, able to make a list of the criteria that make "a good home" in their own culture.</footnote>
the original birthplace of the settlers. In the second case, it referred to
their adoptive land, that is the place where they had settled. The fleeting
nature of the referent of "home," in its geo-cultural connotation, underlines
the fact that this word rather refers to an imagined place than to a strict
geographical location. The term thus suggests the intersection of the
private and the public, of the individual and the community (George 11-12).
"Home" connotes a mental picture often associated with an emotional
representation and the fictional aspect is consequently inherent to this
notion, itself recurrent in literary narratives (George 11).<fnref n="112" /> Home thus
remains a polysemous notion, mirroring the experience of the British
settler in Australia, that of the exile in-between geographical and cultural
landmarks.

## 2. The In-Betweenness of Exile

Ada Cambridge's texts reveal her homesickness and nostalgia for
her native England, but they also demonstrate a gradual adaptation to the
Australian colonies. Indeed, in the absence of any possibility of physically
going back and forth between England and Australia, Cambridge moves
back and forth between these two points of reference in her fiction, to
make sense of the in-between experience of the exile. In a context in
which former cultural landmarks have been left behind while new ones are
not determined yet, the search for a stable home drives the characters
to go back and forth between England and Australia. For instance, in
the serial tales, Jim goes twice to Australia while Colonel Devereux, an
Englishman who has come to visit him, also makes the return trip. Another
instance is found in the serial novel "Up the Murray," in which the heroine
Dorothy leaves England for Victoria, consequently faced with the gradual
process of familiarisation with her new environment. When she arrives
in Melbourne, England and the colony are first constructed as opposed,
as shown in the dialogue between Dorothy and her stepbrother Heriot:

<footnote n="112">¹¹² Rosemary Marangoly George relies on Nancy Armstrong's statement in *Desire and Domestic Fiction: a Political History of the Novel*: "[the] most powerful household is the one we carry around in our heads" (Armstrong 251). George adds that the mental image is also important in our understanding of what makes "home," so much so that most people are, according to her, able to make a list of the criteria that make "a good home" in their own culture.</footnote>
"How do you like the look of the country?" he asked her, for the sake of saying something, and to get a good view of her face.

"Very, very much," she replied, regarding the ugly brick and mortar prospect around her. "I knew I should."

"That's right. You know it's rather the fashion with you new people to turn up your noses at the young country, because it doesn't happen to be as old as its mother. I'm glad you don't." ("Up the Murray" 453)

Dorothy's elusive commentary in the form of an antiphrasis suggests a more than mitigated enthusiasm for what she has so far encountered in the colony, while Heriot's answer underlines the new settler's rejection of a colony perceived as "Other" as well as "younger" than native England. The story "Charlie" (January 1872), from the same series, offers another example of this colonial hierarchisation: when Jim, the first-person narrator, meets again with Charlie, his former Oxford classmate who has also become a vicar in Victoria, he underlines the contrast that he sees between the British upper-class education that Charlie has received and his new life in the colony: "There was a sunny atmosphere of wealth and prosperity and noble breeding about him, that could never have associated itself with a thought of his colonial life" ("Charlie" 37). The adjective "colonial" is pejoratively used, as it is also in "Our New Chum" (October 1871), in which the English Colonel Devereux despises the colonials, that is to say those who were born in Australia—"colonial born and bred" ("Our New Chum" 486). The use of the adjective "colonial" connoting a cultural inferiority, commonplace in the colonial context, was a source of debate in the press, as shown in this article published in the newspaper *The Brisbane Courier* on May 16th, 1898, which starts by recalling this widespread idea:

> It has been said of the colonial, born and bred in Australia, that he has no respect for history, traditions, and antiquities. All things and all people that are not up-to-date and immaculately modern are relegated by them to the class of "have beens" to the uninteresting past, to a fossil era. (Glennie 6)
"How do you like the look of the country?" he asked her, for the sake of saying something, and to get a good view of her face.

"Very, very much," she replied, regarding the ugly brick and mortar prospect around her. "I knew I should."

"That's right. You know it's rather the fashion with you new people to turn up your noses at the young country, because it doesn't happen to be as old as its mother. I'm glad you don't." ("Up the Murray" 453)

Dorothy's elusive commentary in the form of an antiphrasis suggests a more than mitigated enthusiasm for what she has so far encountered in the colony, while Heriot's answer underlines the new settler's rejection of a colony perceived as "Other" as well as "younger" than native England. The story "Charlie" (January 1872), from the same series, offers another example of this colonial hierarchisation: when Jim, the first-person narrator, meets again with Charlie, his former Oxford classmate who has also become a vicar in Victoria, he underlines the contrast that he sees between the British upper-class education that Charlie has received and his new life in the colony: "There was a sunny atmosphere of wealth and prosperity and noble breeding about him, that could never have associated itself with a thought of his colonial life" ("Charlie" 37). The adjective "colonial" is pejoratively used, as it is also in "Our New Chum" (October 1871), in which the English Colonel Devereux despises the colonials, that is to say those who were born in Australia—"colonial born and bred" ("Our New Chum" 486). The use of the adjective "colonial" connoting a cultural inferiority, commonplace in the colonial context, was a source of debate in the press, as shown in this article published in the newspaper *The Brisbane Courier* on May 16th, 1898, which starts by recalling this widespread idea:

> It has been said of the colonial, born and bred in Australia, that he has no respect for history, traditions, and antiquities. All things and all people that are not up-to-date and immaculately modern are relegated by them to the class of "have beens" to the uninteresting past, to a fossil era. (Glennie 6)
The representation of the imperialist hierarchisation between the "old" and the "new" is also a regular feature of Australian nineteenth-century fiction, as shown in the novel *Policy and Passion* (1881), written by another major yet long dismissed woman writer, Rosa Praed. In this novel, the character of Honoria Longleat thinks that to be considered "colonial" is demeaning:

"Do not call me a colonial," said Honoria, with pretty petulence.
"When you have lived longer in Australia you will know that you could
not pay a young lady a worse compliment." [...] "To be *colonial* is to
talk Australian slang; to be badly dressed, vulgar, everything that is
abominable." (Praed 8)

Honoria firmly rejects this colonial label, associating it to a type of
behaviour deemed socially and culturally inferior. The colonial binary
opposition "Them Vs. Us" is thus subverted since the Anglo-Australian
becomes part of "Them," as the Indigenous other would be, while the
British subject belongs to "Us." Likewise, in Ada Cambridge's novel *In
Two Years' Time* (1879), the British cousin of the Australian heroine Kitty
is surprised to discover that Kitty, despite being a "colonial," has good
taste and perfect manners:

"How very nice looking Kitty is [...]. She doesn't look the least colonial,
uncle, that is what surprises us so much. Mamma says she cannot
understand it. We thought she'd be—well, a little shy and awkward—
a little uncomfortable in society—that sort of thing." (*In Two Years' Time* 186)

This is evidence of a discourse based on difference and spread by the
imperial power which frequently represented the British settlers in
the colonies as inferior, reaffirming the supposed superiority of the
British imperial centre (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 194). In "Bachelor
Troubles" (August 1872), from the series of seven tales, the adjective
"colonial" is also used in a negative manner when Jim describes his house
as paradoxically not being a place deserving the name of home: "They
The representation of the imperialist hierarchisation between the "old" and the "new" is also a regular feature of Australian nineteenth-century fiction, as shown in the novel *Policy and Passion* (1881), written by another major yet long dismissed woman writer, Rosa Praed. In this novel, the character of Honoria Longleat thinks that to be considered "colonial" is demeaning:

"Do not call me a colonial," said Honoria, with pretty petulence.
"When you have lived longer in Australia you will know that you could
not pay a young lady a worse compliment." [...] "To be *colonial* is to
talk Australian slang; to be badly dressed, vulgar, everything that is
abominable." (Praed 8)

Honoria firmly rejects this colonial label, associating it to a type of
behaviour deemed socially and culturally inferior. The colonial binary
opposition "Them Vs. Us" is thus subverted since the Anglo-Australian
becomes part of "Them," as the Indigenous other would be, while the
British subject belongs to "Us." Likewise, in Ada Cambridge's novel *In
Two Years' Time* (1879), the British cousin of the Australian heroine Kitty
is surprised to discover that Kitty, despite being a "colonial," has good
taste and perfect manners:

"How very nice looking Kitty is [...]. She doesn't look the least colonial,
uncle, that is what surprises us so much. Mamma says she cannot
understand it. We thought she'd be—well, a little shy and awkward—
a little uncomfortable in society—that sort of thing." (*In Two Years' Time* 186)

This is evidence of a discourse based on difference and spread by the
imperial power which frequently represented the British settlers in
the colonies as inferior, reaffirming the supposed superiority of the
British imperial centre (Ashcroft, Griffiths, and Tiffin 194). In "Bachelor
Troubles" (August 1872), from the series of seven tales, the adjective
"colonial" is also used in a negative manner when Jim describes his house
as paradoxically not being a place deserving the name of home: "They
[i.e. the tiny rooms] were uninviting, common-place, and colonial. The house no longer looked like a home" (261). Being colonial prevents the house from being homely and the use of the adjective "colonial" is associated with Jim's impossibility to feel "at home." Jim's point of reference remains England, which is the object of his nostalgic thoughts, preventing him from building a new referent for home in the colonies.

To define and to look for a new home in the Victorian colony is a central theme in the seven tales, in which the process of feeling at home includes the appreciation and evaluation of the Australian landscape. For instance, in "Up the Murray," the narrator takes good care to underline the beauty of Australian nature and notably of "the beautiful Australian twilight" (517). As the narrator points out,

[p]eople who are in the habit of depreciating the colony—not consciously prejudiced, perhaps, but looking generally upon the underside of things—have made up their minds that we have no twilight. [...] But the "glory is equal" to an impartial mind. Nature seems to have rubbed down her colours for each fair picture with the same free hand, but to have diluted them a little more in the one case than the other [...]. (517)

In Australia, the scene is compared to a "divine transfiguration" in which the metaphorical description of the sunset as a painting tends to erase the social and cultural hierarchy established between England and its colony, in favour of a comparison on poetic and aesthetic grounds that metaphorically unite the two worlds ("Up the Murray" 517).

In her memoirs, Cambridge also refers to the impact of the Australian nature on her mind, and among the unforgettable Australian recollections, she mentions the Victorian sunrises:

> That lake was the region of romance to me. The sunrises out of its mists and shimmers, the moonbeams on its breast at night, that I used to step out upon the terrace-like verandah to feast upon—they are pictures of memory that can never fade. (Thirty Years 65)
[i.e. the tiny rooms] were uninviting, common-place, and colonial. The house no longer looked like a home" (261). Being colonial prevents the house from being homely and the use of the adjective "colonial" is associated with Jim's impossibility to feel "at home." Jim's point of reference remains England, which is the object of his nostalgic thoughts, preventing him from building a new referent for home in the colonies.

To define and to look for a new home in the Victorian colony is a central theme in the seven tales, in which the process of feeling at home includes the appreciation and evaluation of the Australian landscape. For instance, in "Up the Murray," the narrator takes good care to underline the beauty of Australian nature and notably of "the beautiful Australian twilight" (517). As the narrator points out,

[p]eople who are in the habit of depreciating the colony—not consciously prejudiced, perhaps, but looking generally upon the underside of things—have made up their minds that we have no twilight. [...] But the "glory is equal" to an impartial mind. Nature seems to have rubbed down her colours for each fair picture with the same free hand, but to have diluted them a little more in the one case than the other [...]. (517)

In Australia, the scene is compared to a "divine transfiguration" in which the metaphorical description of the sunset as a painting tends to erase the social and cultural hierarchy established between England and its colony, in favour of a comparison on poetic and aesthetic grounds that metaphorically unite the two worlds ("Up the Murray" 517).

In her memoirs, Cambridge also refers to the impact of the Australian nature on her mind, and among the unforgettable Australian recollections, she mentions the Victorian sunrises:

> That lake was the region of romance to me. The sunrises out of its mists and shimmers, the moonbeams on its breast at night, that I used to step out upon the terrace-like verandah to feast upon—they are pictures of memory that can never fade. (*Thirty Years* 65)
In this romantic perspective, the sight offered by nature enables the viewer to reflect upon herself in a place of rest, away from the concerns of society. Moreover, a visual, artistic metaphor is used again to convey the impact that nature has on her marvelled mind. The second volume of Cambridge's memoirs, *The Retrospect*, published in 1912, demonstrates the same type of attachment both to England and Australia, in which homesickness and love for her new environment are constantly mingled. The first chapter of her memoirs, entitled "Coming Home," with "home" referring in this case to her native England, starts with the nostalgia felt by the writer during the thirty-eight years that she spent in Australia between 1870 and 1908:

> For about seven-eighths of that long time in Australia, while succeeding very well in making the best of things, I was never without a subconscious sense of exile, a chronic nostalgia, that could hardly bear the sight of a homeward-bound ship. (*The Retrospect* 11)

The term "exile" conveys the strength of the uprooting; yet, having returned to England, the writer becomes aware of the beauties of Australia that homesickness prevented her from appreciating: "Australia is a land of plenty to all her people, high and low, but we forget it until we go away from her. Then we know" (*The Retrospect* 33). Exile thus enables the reconfiguration of the writer's perception of home, when she is away from her original home.

Last but not least, the oscillation between England and Australia can also be found in the different places represented in her first novels. *My Guardian: A Story of the Fen Country*, the novel published after the serial "Up the Murray," takes place in England from beginning to end, in the Fens region in the east of England, and focuses on a rising love story between the heroine Daisy, an orphan, and her guardian Jack Stafford. The novel was first published in serial form in England, in the *Cassell's Family Magazine* from 1876 to 1877, before being published in book form in London the following year. Contrary to "Up the Murray," its target readership must have been British. The references to Australia are rare, and the novel does not seem to be targeting a specific British
In this romantic perspective, the sight offered by nature enables the viewer to reflect upon herself in a place of rest, away from the concerns of society. Moreover, a visual, artistic metaphor is used again to convey the impact that nature has on her marvelled mind. The second volume of Cambridge's memoirs, *The Retrospect*, published in 1912, demonstrates the same type of attachment both to England and Australia, in which homesickness and love for her new environment are constantly mingled. The first chapter of her memoirs, entitled "Coming Home," with "home" referring in this case to her native England, starts with the nostalgia felt by the writer during the thirty-eight years that she spent in Australia between 1870 and 1908:

> For about seven-eighths of that long time in Australia, while succeeding very well in making the best of things, I was never without a subconscious sense of exile, a chronic nostalgia, that could hardly bear the sight of a homeward-bound ship. (*The Retrospect* 11)

The term "exile" conveys the strength of the uprooting; yet, having returned to England, the writer becomes aware of the beauties of Australia that homesickness prevented her from appreciating: "Australia is a land of plenty to all her people, high and low, but we forget it until we go away from her. Then we know" (*The Retrospect* 33). Exile thus enables the reconfiguration of the writer's perception of home, when she is away from her original home.

Last but not least, the oscillation between England and Australia can also be found in the different places represented in her first novels. *My Guardian: A Story of the Fen Country*, the novel published after the serial "Up the Murray," takes place in England from beginning to end, in the Fens region in the east of England, and focuses on a rising love story between the heroine Daisy, an orphan, and her guardian Jack Stafford. The novel was first published in serial form in England, in the *Cassell's Family Magazine* from 1876 to 1877, before being published in book form in London the following year. Contrary to "Up the Murray," its target readership must have been British. The references to Australia are rare, and the novel does not seem to be targeting a specific British
readership that would be looking for exotic references and information
on the far-away land that Australia represented. This way of negotiating
a change that was simultaneously geographical, cultural and social, i.e.
the departure for the colonies, is very much present in Cambridge's first
narratives, which also reveals quite a lot about the writer's own situation
as a new settler in Victoria. This concern remains a recurring one in her
following novels. For instance, in the novel *Materfamilias* (1898), written
two decades later, the interaction between England and the Australian
colonies is a central theme, as is the construction of the family home.
The word "home" is also one of the most used in the novel, appearing
seventy-six times, which highlights Cambridge's constant concern for
this concept.<fnref n="113" /> Likewise, in "The Perversity of Human Nature," the heroine
Alexandra Hay is homesick for her native England:

> What she really wanted was to look at the fabric and the faces that
> had come direct from England and were going back there again—to
> get, in fact, as near to England itself as possible. She looked back
> to England now as the true believer looks forward to Heaven. There
> was the home of the elect—the city of satisfied desires—the haven
> where she would be. (*The Perversity of Human Nature* n.p.)

The imaginary going back and forth between England and Australia, in
the form of the oscillation between nostalgia for the original English
home and marvel before the Australian nature, and expressed through
the regular comparisons between England and colonial Australia,
conveys the attempt at finding a way of defining "home" at the end of the
nineteenth-century, a period marked by the disruption of exile, immigration,
and the transformation of the colonies.

<footnote n="113">¹¹³ The term “home” is the ninth most used in the novel *Materfamilias*, in terms of recurrence. Amongst the words that are more repeated in the novel, there are “oh,” “quite,” “poor,” “think,” “thought,” “looked,” “dear”—and finally “mother.” “Mother” and “home” are therefore the content nouns that are the most used in the novel, which is quite revealing of Cambridge’s concerns in her fiction. “Home” is also the most used word in several chapters of the novel, as in Chapter 2, with 18 occurrences (with the exclusion of the characters’ first names) or chapter 3, in which it is the second most used word with 13 occurrences after the noun “thing” (15 occurrences).</footnote>
readership that would be looking for exotic references and information
on the far-away land that Australia represented. This way of negotiating
a change that was simultaneously geographical, cultural and social, i.e.
the departure for the colonies, is very much present in Cambridge's first
narratives, which also reveals quite a lot about the writer's own situation
as a new settler in Victoria. This concern remains a recurring one in her
following novels. For instance, in the novel *Materfamilias* (1898), written
two decades later, the interaction between England and the Australian
colonies is a central theme, as is the construction of the family home.
The word "home" is also one of the most used in the novel, appearing
seventy-six times, which highlights Cambridge's constant concern for
this concept.<fnref n="113" /> Likewise, in "The Perversity of Human Nature," the heroine
Alexandra Hay is homesick for her native England:

> What she really wanted was to look at the fabric and the faces that
> had come direct from England and were going back there again—to
> get, in fact, as near to England itself as possible. She looked back
> to England now as the true believer looks forward to Heaven. There
> was the home of the elect—the city of satisfied desires—the haven
> where she would be. (*The Perversity of Human Nature* n.p.)

The imaginary going back and forth between England and Australia, in
the form of the oscillation between nostalgia for the original English
home and marvel before the Australian nature, and expressed through
the regular comparisons between England and colonial Australia,
conveys the attempt at finding a way of defining "home" at the end of the
nineteenth-century, a period marked by the disruption of exile, immigration,
and the transformation of the colonies.

<footnote n="113">¹¹³ The term “home” is the ninth most used in the novel *Materfamilias*, in terms of recurrence. Amongst the words that are more repeated in the novel, there are “oh,” “quite,” “poor,” “think,” “thought,” “looked,” “dear”—and finally “mother.” “Mother” and “home” are therefore the content nouns that are the most used in the novel, which is quite revealing of Cambridge’s concerns in her fiction. “Home” is also the most used word in several chapters of the novel, as in Chapter 2, with 18 occurrences (with the exclusion of the characters’ first names) or chapter 3, in which it is the second most used word with 13 occurrences after the noun “thing” (15 occurrences).</footnote>
3. A Cultural and Family Disruption

In her writing, Cambridge seems to be putting into practice her aunt's
opinion, who advised her to write about events and feelings that she
had experienced: "And why don't you write what you understand?" (The
Retrospect 79). As an expatriate, Cambridge had a first-hand experience
of homesickness; for financial reasons, Ada and George Cross could not
return to England as soon as they hoped and Cambridge had to adapt to
her new Australian life. Her mother, forced to wait for her return, died
without seeing her daughter again, a fact which caused Ada Cambridge
great distress, and which is echoed in her fiction. Indeed, Cambridge's
very first Australian narrative, "Three Years' Ago," opens on the pain
experienced by the homesick settler:

Time, it is said, cures all diseases, mends all the gaps that are broken
in one's life, kills off and buries, sooner or later, all that progeny of
troubles and trials that is born to each of us. But I think, the home-
sickness of those whose homes are on the other side of the world
becomes a chronic complaint. (133)

The metaphor of exile as a disease which cannot be cured is used by
the protagonist Jim Morris, a vicar in Australia, to refer to his forced
exile far from his native England, imposed on him by a family member
who ensured that Jim received the necessary education in order to
become a vicar in Australia. In both Cambridge's fiction and her memoirs,
coming to Australia translates as suffering from isolation. The incurable
nostalgia felt by Jim is indeed reminiscent of Cambridge's statement in
her autobiography and echoes the homesickness which she claims not
to have been able to get rid of:

We have been homesick practically all the time—good as Australia
has been to us. At any moment of these thirty odd years we would
have made for our native land like homing pigeons, could we have
found the means. (Thirty Years 2)
3. A Cultural and Family Disruption

In her writing, Cambridge seems to be putting into practice her aunt's
opinion, who advised her to write about events and feelings that she
had experienced: "And why don't you write what you understand?" (The
Retrospect 79). As an expatriate, Cambridge had a first-hand experience
of homesickness; for financial reasons, Ada and George Cross could not
return to England as soon as they hoped and Cambridge had to adapt to
her new Australian life. Her mother, forced to wait for her return, died
without seeing her daughter again, a fact which caused Ada Cambridge
great distress, and which is echoed in her fiction. Indeed, Cambridge's
very first Australian narrative, "Three Years' Ago," opens on the pain
experienced by the homesick settler:

Time, it is said, cures all diseases, mends all the gaps that are broken
in one's life, kills off and buries, sooner or later, all that progeny of
troubles and trials that is born to each of us. But I think, the home-
sickness of those whose homes are on the other side of the world
becomes a chronic complaint. (133)

The metaphor of exile as a disease which cannot be cured is used by
the protagonist Jim Morris, a vicar in Australia, to refer to his forced
exile far from his native England, imposed on him by a family member
who ensured that Jim received the necessary education in order to
become a vicar in Australia. In both Cambridge's fiction and her memoirs,
coming to Australia translates as suffering from isolation. The incurable
nostalgia felt by Jim is indeed reminiscent of Cambridge's statement in
her autobiography and echoes the homesickness which she claims not
to have been able to get rid of:

We have been homesick practically all the time—good as Australia
has been to us. At any moment of these thirty odd years we would
have made for our native land like homing pigeons, could we have
found the means. (Thirty Years 2)
If references to homesickness abound in her memoirs ("the yearly aspiration of my homesick soul," "a home-sickness that could only be cured by fetching me back again," etc.) (*Thirty Years* 4, 176), the loneliness experienced by the settler is often projected upon the Australian landscape. The isolation of the characters in Australia is indeed transferred onto the Australian environment: "I fell to musing as I walked along round a bend of the solitary river," Jim thinks in "Our New Chum" (486). The hypallage underlines the fact that the young vicar feels alone when he wanders in the bush, a feeling which is intensified in "Bachelor Troubles," in which Jim admits his solitude: "I was more lonely than ever in this first 'home' of my own" ("Bachelor Troubles" 262). Here the term "home" is used by default, being the first house that Jim owns even if he cannot grant it the sentimental connotation of a home. The tension between the two connotations of the term "home"—on the one hand as household and on the other as native culture—is thus emphasised, shown as the result of the colonial situation having led to a disjunction between the two types of relationships. In this light, the narrative is used as a way to expose this disjunction and as an attempt to reunite these two binding spaces.

For the writer as for her characters, settling in Australia is described as a forced departure leading to a familial dissolution; in short, as a scission in filiation. In *The World, the Text and the Critic*, Edward Said distinguishes between two types of bonds between individuals: the first one, which he calls "filiation," refers to a person's bonds with places and people according to his or her native culture; the second one, "affiliation," corresponds to ties established with institutions, associations, communities, i.e. with socially-created entities. The affiliative link replaces that of filiation, moving from nature to culture:

> A filial relationship was held together by natural bonds and natural forms of authority—involving obedience, fear, love, respect, and instinctual conflict—the new affiliative relationship changes these bonds into what seem to be transpersonal forms—such as guild consciousness, consensus, collegiality, professional respect, class, and hegemony of a dominant culture. The filiative scheme belongs to
If references to homesickness abound in her memoirs ("the yearly aspiration of my homesick soul," "a home-sickness that could only be cured by fetching me back again," etc.) (Thirty Years 4, 176), the loneliness experienced by the settler is often projected upon the Australian landscape. The isolation of the characters in Australia is indeed transferred onto the Australian environment: "I fell to musing as I walked along round a bend of the solitary river," Jim thinks in "Our New Chum" (486). The hypallage underlines the fact that the young vicar feels alone when he wanders in the bush, a feeling which is intensified in "Bachelor Troubles," in which Jim admits his solitude: "I was more lonely than ever in this first 'home' of my own" ("Bachelor Troubles" 262). Here the term "home" is used by default, being the first house that Jim owns even if he cannot grant it the sentimental connotation of a home. The tension between the two connotations of the term "home"—on the one hand as household and on the other as native culture—is thus emphasised, shown as the result of the colonial situation having led to a disjunction between the two types of relationships. In this light, the narrative is used as a way to expose this disjunction and as an attempt to reunite these two binding spaces.

For the writer as for her characters, settling in Australia is described as a forced departure leading to a familial dissolution; in short, as a scission in filiation. In *The World, the Text and the Critic*, Edward Said distinguishes between two types of bonds between individuals: the first one, which he calls "filiation," refers to a person's bonds with places and people according to his or her native culture; the second one, "affiliation," corresponds to ties established with institutions, associations, communities, i.e. with socially-created entities. The affiliative link replaces that of filiation, moving from nature to culture:

> A filial relationship was held together by natural bonds and natural forms of authority—involving obedience, fear, love, respect, and instinctual conflict—the new affiliative relationship changes these bonds into what seem to be transpersonal forms—such as guild consciousness, consensus, collegiality, professional respect, class, and hegemony of a dominant culture. The filiative scheme belongs to
the realm of nature and “life,” whereas affiliation belongs exclusively to culture and society (Said 20).

In *The Politics of Home*, Rose Marangoly George offers a metaphorical analysis of the above-mentioned passage and considers “home” as a filial relationship in the nation itself and in the nation’s discourses of affiliation. Comparing Said’s statement with the words of Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of independent Kenya, George suggests that no “natural” bond exists between a place and a person, but only connections that can be tied or untied, on material or spiritual levels.<fnref n="114" /> In Cambridge’s novels, the filial connections are doubly deconstructed, at the collective level and at the level of the family unit. Just like Jim Morris in “Three Years’ Ago”—whose experience mirrors Cambridge’s—, the women characters in the serial novel “Up the Murray” are forced to leave England for Australia. For instance, Patty has to follow her husband and Dorothy has to join them after her father’s death—her mother died giving birth and she is thus an orphan. In Cambridge’s novels that deal with exile, the heroines are often orphans, having lost their mothers early in life. These include, among others and besides the sisters in “Up the Murray,” the three sisters in *The Three Miss Kings* (1883), who have to find their way in the colonial society of Melbourne once orphans, the heroine of “The Perversity of Human Nature” (1887), who is an orphan without any guardian or close family members, and also the heroine of *Materfamilias* (1898), who runs away from her family home to go to Australia when her father dies. Hence the disruption is not only geographical or cultural for the Australian settler, it also refers to the family. The uprooting induced by the colonial experience takes place on the collective and at the national level, as well as on the individual, family level. Thus, to reconstruct a “home” is all the more difficult as the two referents of the term—“home-country” and “household”—are simultaneously disrupted.

The departure for Australia is felt as an exile when it is forced, as in “Up the Murray,” in which Patty’s and Dorothy’s departures are reluctant

<footnote n="114">¹¹⁴ “A culture has no meaning apart from the social organization of life on which it is built. When the European comes to Gikuyu country and robs the people of their land, he is taking away, not only livelihood, but also the material symbol that holds families together” (Kenyatta 54).</footnote>
the realm of nature and “life,” whereas affiliation belongs exclusively to culture and society (Said 20).

In *The Politics of Home*, Rose Marangoly George offers a metaphorical analysis of the above-mentioned passage and considers “home” as a filial relationship in the nation itself and in the nation’s discourses of affiliation. Comparing Said’s statement with the words of Jomo Kenyatta, the first president of independent Kenya, George suggests that no “natural” bond exists between a place and a person, but only connections that can be tied or untied, on material or spiritual levels.<fnref n="114" /> In Cambridge’s novels, the filial connections are doubly deconstructed, at the collective level and at the level of the family unit. Just like Jim Morris in “Three Years’ Ago”—whose experience mirrors Cambridge’s—, the women characters in the serial novel “Up the Murray” are forced to leave England for Australia. For instance, Patty has to follow her husband and Dorothy has to join them after her father’s death—her mother died giving birth and she is thus an orphan. In Cambridge’s novels that deal with exile, the heroines are often orphans, having lost their mothers early in life. These include, among others and besides the sisters in “Up the Murray,” the three sisters in *The Three Miss Kings* (1883), who have to find their way in the colonial society of Melbourne once orphans, the heroine of “The Perversity of Human Nature” (1887), who is an orphan without any guardian or close family members, and also the heroine of *Materfamilias* (1898), who runs away from her family home to go to Australia when her father dies. Hence the disruption is not only geographical or cultural for the Australian settler, it also refers to the family. The uprooting induced by the colonial experience takes place on the collective and at the national level, as well as on the individual, family level. Thus, to reconstruct a “home” is all the more difficult as the two referents of the term—“home-country” and “household”—are simultaneously disrupted.

The departure for Australia is felt as an exile when it is forced, as in “Up the Murray,” in which Patty’s and Dorothy’s departures are reluctant

<footnote n="114">¹¹⁴ “A culture has no meaning apart from the social organization of life on which it is built. When the European comes to Gikuyu country and robs the people of their land, he is taking away, not only livelihood, but also the material symbol that holds families together” (Kenyatta 54).</footnote>
ones: "Patty did not want to go so far away, but, of course, she had to do what her husband thought best, and it was a very good thing for Heriot" ("Up the Murray" 390). The conclusion of the explanation and the addition of the commentary "of course" underline the social constraint weighing on women, whose will was submitted to their husbands'. In Cambridge's seven tales and in "Up the Murray," Australia is described as a land of personal and professional opportunities for male characters, as the above example of Heriot shows, but also that of Charlie in the eponymous tale. One of the direct consequences of these opportunities is the fact that the female characters—Patty in "Up the Murray," Charlie's wife Annie and Jim's wife Mary in "Three Years' Ago"—are forced to follow their husbands in a trajectory whose outcome is an uprooting imposed by their marriage to a man bound to leave for Australia. Once more, it reminds us of Cambridge's own trajectory: "I left them all, never—as now seems only too probable—to return" (Thirty Years 5). Interestingly, only the male characters are allowed to decide to settle in the country which suits them best. For female characters, the very possibility of going back and forth is constantly shown as aborted. For example, the serial tales end precisely when Mary leaves England for Australia in order to join Jim, so that her voyage from England to Australia remains a one-way trip. Sometimes, exile refers to the inverted route, that is to the voyage from Australia to England, but this happens more rarely in Cambridge's texts. Yet, this case is only applied to female characters, as in "The History of Six Hours" (February 1873), in which Kate, married to the English Devereux, leaves her home Victoria without being allowed to ever come back:

"Colonel Devereux doesn't like the colony," she said. "He won't let me call it 'home,' though I was born there, and I am sure he will never take me back. [...] he doesn't understand that my birthplace can be to me what his is to him. Our family has only been 30 years in Australia, and his has been hundreds and hundreds in England. He thinks I was ill-used in my birth and bringing up, and that I am now restored to my proper rights and privileges." ("The History of Six Hours" 198)
ones: "Patty did not want to go so far away, but, of course, she had to do what her husband thought best, and it was a very good thing for Heriot" ("Up the Murray" 390). The conclusion of the explanation and the addition of the commentary "of course" underline the social constraint weighing on women, whose will was submitted to their husbands'. In Cambridge's seven tales and in "Up the Murray," Australia is described as a land of personal and professional opportunities for male characters, as the above example of Heriot shows, but also that of Charlie in the eponymous tale. One of the direct consequences of these opportunities is the fact that the female characters—Patty in "Up the Murray," Charlie's wife Annie and Jim's wife Mary in "Three Years' Ago"—are forced to follow their husbands in a trajectory whose outcome is an uprooting imposed by their marriage to a man bound to leave for Australia. Once more, it reminds us of Cambridge's own trajectory: "I left them all, never—as now seems only too probable—to return" (Thirty Years 5). Interestingly, only the male characters are allowed to decide to settle in the country which suits them best. For female characters, the very possibility of going back and forth is constantly shown as aborted. For example, the serial tales end precisely when Mary leaves England for Australia in order to join Jim, so that her voyage from England to Australia remains a one-way trip. Sometimes, exile refers to the inverted route, that is to the voyage from Australia to England, but this happens more rarely in Cambridge's texts. Yet, this case is only applied to female characters, as in "The History of Six Hours" (February 1873), in which Kate, married to the English Devereux, leaves her home Victoria without being allowed to ever come back:

"Colonel Devereux doesn't like the colony," she said. "He won't let me call it 'home,' though I was born there, and I am sure he will never take me back. [...] he doesn't understand that my birthplace can be to me what his is to him. Our family has only been 30 years in Australia, and his has been hundreds and hundreds in England. He thinks I was ill-used in my birth and bringing up, and that I am now restored to my proper rights and privileges." ("The History of Six Hours" 198)
Kate is not allowed to call her native Australia "home"; in this view, the status of "home" can only be assessed through time, history, ancestry, and hierarchy. In this sense, Colonel Devereux embodies the then widely-spread idea that the Australian colonies were below England in rank, and therefore refuses to return with his wife into the Victorian bush despite her own preference. The power relation between the metropolis and its colonial outskirts pervades the cultural background of the narrative in which two conflicting definitions of "home" are foregrounded, and this power relation is a two-fold one, also including a patriarchal hierarchy over women's choices.

However, despite the difficult conciliation between homesickness and revival put forward in "Up the Murray" and the pessimism of the first six tales of the series initiated by "Three Years' Ago," the seventh and final episode of the series, entitled "At Sea" (June 1873), ends on a positive note regarding the search of a home. Mary, the young English-woman loved by Jim when he was a child and for whom he has crossed again the ocean, is with him on board the ship that brings them back to Australia, when she utters the following words: "It is all different from that now. You have your wife now, my darling, and we are going home" ("At Sea" 806). The word "home" thus ends the series of seven tales, and it is highlighted both by its final position and by the use of the italics, underlining the importance of a notion whose meaning is as fleeting as the context in which it is used. Home—in the domestic sense—can finally emerge because Jim and Mary are now reunited and married, and the love plot opening "Three Years' Ago" thus has a happy end in this final episode. However, revealingly, "home" can only be defined precisely when the protagonists are in a transition phase, on board the ship between England and Australia, reminding readers that "home," in the colonial context, remains by definition a fleeting and unstable notion.

In Cambridge's narratives, crossings of the ocean are numerous and the word "home" is repeated as a leitmotiv in the mouth of the uprooted characters. Cambridge's constant concern for the fleeting and temporary nature of her home, conveyed through the prevalence of the notion of "home" in her autobiography as well as her fiction, is emblematic of the
Kate is not allowed to call her native Australia "home"; in this view, the status of "home" can only be assessed through time, history, ancestry, and hierarchy. In this sense, Colonel Devereux embodies the then widely-spread idea that the Australian colonies were below England in rank, and therefore refuses to return with his wife into the Victorian bush despite her own preference. The power relation between the metropolis and its colonial outskirts pervades the cultural background of the narrative in which two conflicting definitions of "home" are foregrounded, and this power relation is a two-fold one, also including a patriarchal hierarchy over women's choices.

However, despite the difficult conciliation between homesickness and revival put forward in "Up the Murray" and the pessimism of the first six tales of the series initiated by "Three Years' Ago," the seventh and final episode of the series, entitled "At Sea" (June 1873), ends on a positive note regarding the search of a home. Mary, the young English-woman loved by Jim when he was a child and for whom he has crossed again the ocean, is with him on board the ship that brings them back to Australia, when she utters the following words: "It is all different from that now. You have your wife now, my darling, and we are going home" ("At Sea" 806). The word "home" thus ends the series of seven tales, and it is highlighted both by its final position and by the use of the italics, underlining the importance of a notion whose meaning is as fleeting as the context in which it is used. Home—in the domestic sense—can finally emerge because Jim and Mary are now reunited and married, and the love plot opening "Three Years' Ago" thus has a happy end in this final episode. However, revealingly, "home" can only be defined precisely when the protagonists are in a transition phase, on board the ship between England and Australia, reminding readers that "home," in the colonial context, remains by definition a fleeting and unstable notion.

In Cambridge's narratives, crossings of the ocean are numerous and the word "home" is repeated as a leitmotiv in the mouth of the uprooted characters. Cambridge's constant concern for the fleeting and temporary nature of her home, conveyed through the prevalence of the notion of "home" in her autobiography as well as her fiction, is emblematic of the
colonial period. More specifically, "home" remains an elusive notion in Ada Cambridge's texts: the fleeting nature of the referent of "home," in its geo-cultural meaning, underlines the fact that it rather refers to an imagined place than to a strict geographical location. In Cambridge's texts, the fragmentation of the landmarks, due to the fleeting aspect of Cambridge's successive homes—more than eight in Australia itself—was nonetheless in part compensated by the unity that the writer found in the bush, which she lived in and which became her new "world" (Thirty Years 72). Furthermore, in the absence of the possibility of physically going back and forth between England and Australia, Cambridge moves back and forth between these two locations in her fiction, conveying the complexity of the exile's experience, between homesickness for England and a gradual settlement in the Australian colonies. She uses fiction as a way of erasing the social and cultural hierarchisation established between England and its colonies, and fictionally unites those two worlds. Last but not least, her texts emphasise the fact that the disruption of home, far from being only geographical or cultural for the Australian settler, is also of family—and marital—and all the more so for women. Ada Cambridge thus focuses on the social constraints weighing on women, in relation to the search of a home, threatening the attempt at finding both a cultural and familial anchorage, and constantly reminding us that "home," in the colonial context, remains a fleeting and unstable notion.
colonial period. More specifically, "home" remains an elusive notion in Ada Cambridge's texts: the fleeting nature of the referent of "home," in its geo-cultural meaning, underlines the fact that it rather refers to an imagined place than to a strict geographical location. In Cambridge's texts, the fragmentation of the landmarks, due to the fleeting aspect of Cambridge's successive homes—more than eight in Australia itself—was nonetheless in part compensated by the unity that the writer found in the bush, which she lived in and which became her new "world" (Thirty Years 72). Furthermore, in the absence of the possibility of physically going back and forth between England and Australia, Cambridge moves back and forth between these two locations in her fiction, conveying the complexity of the exile's experience, between homesickness for England and a gradual settlement in the Australian colonies. She uses fiction as a way of erasing the social and cultural hierarchisation established between England and its colonies, and fictionally unites those two worlds. Last but not least, her texts emphasise the fact that the disruption of home, far from being only geographical or cultural for the Australian settler, is also of family—and marital—and all the more so for women. Ada Cambridge thus focuses on the social constraints weighing on women, in relation to the search of a home, threatening the attempt at finding both a cultural and familial anchorage, and constantly reminding us that "home," in the colonial context, remains a fleeting and unstable notion.
## Works cited

ANONYMOUS. "History of immigration from England." *Origins: Immigrant Communities in Victoria*, Museum Victoria, https://museumvictoria.com.au/origins. Accessed 10 August 2017.

ARMSTRONG, Nancy. *Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel*. New York, Oxford UP, 2006.

ASHCROFT, Bill, Graham GRIFFITHS, and Gareth GRIFFITHS. *The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures*. London, Routledge, 2002.

—, Gareth GRIFFITHS, and Helen TIFFIN. *Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts*. London, Routledge, 2007.

BRADSTOCK, Margaret, and Louise Katherine WAKELING. *Rattling the Orthodoxies: A Life of Ada Cambridge*. Ringwood, Victoria, Penguin / assisted by the Literature Board of the Australia Council, 1991.

CAMBRIDGE, Ada. *My Guardian: A Story of the Fen Country*. London, Petter, Galpin Cassell, 1878.

—. *In Two Years' Time*. London, Richard Bentley and Son, 1879.

—. *Materfamilias*. London, Ward, Lock, 1898.

—. *Thirty Years in Australia*. London, Methuen, 1903.

—. "Letter to H.G. Turner." Manuscript. State Library of Victoria. 12 January 1911.

—. *The Retrospect*. London, Stanley Paul & Co, 1912.

CAMBRIDGE, Ada, ("A.C."). "Three Years' Ago." *The Australasian*, vol. 11, n° 278, 29 July 1871, pp. 133-134.

—. "Our New Chum." *The Australasian*, vol. 11, n° 289, October 1871, pp. 486-487.

—. "Charlie." *The Australasian*, vol. 12, n° 302, 13 January 1872, pp. 37-38.

—. "Charlie's Wife." *The Australasian*, vol. 12, n° 318, 4 May 1872, pp. 549-550.

—. "Bachelor Troubles." *The Australasian*, vol. 13, n° 355, 31 August 1872, pp. 261-262.

—. "The History of Six Hours." *The Australasian*, vol. 14, n° 359, 15 February 1873, p. 198.

—. "At Sea." *The Australasian*, vol. 14, n° 378, 28 June 1873, pp. 805-806.

—. "Up the Murray." *The Australasian*, vol. 18-19, n° 469-485, 27 March-18 July 1875.
## Works cited

ANONYMOUS. "History of immigration from England." *Origins: Immigrant Communities in Victoria*, Museum Victoria, https://museumvictoria.com.au/origins. Accessed 10 August 2017.

ARMSTRONG, Nancy. *Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel*. New York, Oxford UP, 2006.

ASHCROFT, Bill, Graham GRIFFITHS, and Gareth GRIFFITHS. *The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures*. London, Routledge, 2002.

—, Gareth GRIFFITHS, and Helen TIFFIN. *Post-Colonial Studies: The Key Concepts*. London, Routledge, 2007.

BRADSTOCK, Margaret, and Louise Katherine WAKELING. *Rattling the Orthodoxies: A Life of Ada Cambridge*. Ringwood, Victoria, Penguin / assisted by the Literature Board of the Australia Council, 1991.

CAMBRIDGE, Ada. *My Guardian: A Story of the Fen Country*. London, Petter, Galpin Cassell, 1878.

—. *In Two Years' Time*. London, Richard Bentley and Son, 1879.

—. *Materfamilias*. London, Ward, Lock, 1898.

—. *Thirty Years in Australia*. London, Methuen, 1903.

—. "Letter to H.G. Turner." Manuscript. State Library of Victoria. 12 January 1911.

—. *The Retrospect*. London, Stanley Paul & Co, 1912.

CAMBRIDGE, Ada, ("A.C."). "Three Years' Ago." *The Australasian*, vol. 11, n° 278, 29 July 1871, pp. 133-134.

—. "Our New Chum." *The Australasian*, vol. 11, n° 289, October 1871, pp. 486-487.

—. "Charlie." *The Australasian*, vol. 12, n° 302, 13 January 1872, pp. 37-38.

—. "Charlie's Wife." *The Australasian*, vol. 12, n° 318, 4 May 1872, pp. 549-550.

—. "Bachelor Troubles." *The Australasian*, vol. 13, n° 355, 31 August 1872, pp. 261-262.

—. "The History of Six Hours." *The Australasian*, vol. 14, n° 359, 15 February 1873, p. 198.

—. "At Sea." *The Australasian*, vol. 14, n° 378, 28 June 1873, pp. 805-806.

—. "Up the Murray." *The Australasian*, vol. 18-19, n° 469-485, 27 March-18 July 1875.
—. "The Three Miss Kings." *The Australasian*, vol. 34-35, supplements to n° 899-924, 23 June-15 December 1883.

—. "The Perversity of Human Nature." *The Illustrated Australian News*, Christmas supplement to n° 391, 1887, pp. 1-16. Online version, SETIS: Sydney Electronic Text and Image Service. The University of Sydney. http://adc.library.usyd.edu.au/data-2/p00073.pdf n.p.

CRESSWELL, Tim. *Place: A Short Introduction*. Malden, Oxford and Carlton, Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

GEORGE, Rosemary Marangoly. *The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction*. Berkeley, U of California P, 1999.

GLENNIE B.A, The Venerable Archdeacon. "An Interview." *The Brisbane Courier*, 16 May 1898, p. 6.

KENYATTA, Jomo. *Facing Mount Kenya: The Traditional Life of the Gikuyu*. East African Educational Publishers, 2015.

KINGSLEY, Henry. *The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn*. Cambridge, Macmillan, 1859.

PRAED, Rosa ("Mrs. Campbell Praed"). *Policy and Passion, A Novel of Australian Life*. London, Richard Bentley and Son, 1881.

RUSKIN, John. "Of Queen's Gardens." 1865. *Sesame and Lilies: Two Lectures*. London, G. Allen, 1902.

SAID, Edward W. *The World, the Text and the Critic*. Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1983.

TATE, Audrey. *Ada Cambridge: Her Life and Work, 1844-1926*. Carlton, Victoria, Melbourne UP, 1991.

TUAN, Yi-Fu. *Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience*. Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 1977.

TURNER, Henry Gyles, and Alexander SUTHERLAND. *The Development of Australian Literature*. London, Longmans, Green, 1898.

WAGNER, Tamara S., ed. *Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand*. London, Pickering & Chatto, 2014.
—. "The Three Miss Kings." *The Australasian*, vol. 34-35, supplements to n° 899-924, 23 June-15 December 1883.

—. "The Perversity of Human Nature." *The Illustrated Australian News*, Christmas supplement to n° 391, 1887, pp. 1-16. Online version, SETIS: Sydney Electronic Text and Image Service. The University of Sydney. http://adc.library.usyd.edu.au/data-2/p00073.pdf n.p.

CRESSWELL, Tim. *Place: A Short Introduction*. Malden, Oxford and Carlton, Blackwell Publishing, 2004.

GEORGE, Rosemary Marangoly. *The Politics of Home: Postcolonial Relocations and Twentieth-Century Fiction*. Berkeley, U of California P, 1999.

GLENNIE B.A, The Venerable Archdeacon. "An Interview." *The Brisbane Courier*, 16 May 1898, p. 6.

KENYATTA, Jomo. *Facing Mount Kenya: The Traditional Life of the Gikuyu*. East African Educational Publishers, 2015.

KINGSLEY, Henry. *The Recollections of Geoffry Hamlyn*. Cambridge, Macmillan, 1859.

PRAED, Rosa ("Mrs. Campbell Praed"). *Policy and Passion, A Novel of Australian Life*. London, Richard Bentley and Son, 1881.

RUSKIN, John. "Of Queen's Gardens." 1865. *Sesame and Lilies: Two lectures*. London, G. Allen, 1902.

SAID, Edward W. *The World, the Text and the Critic*. Cambridge, Harvard UP, 1983.

TATE, Audrey. *Ada Cambridge: Her Life and Work, 1844-1926*. Carlton, Victoria, Melbourne UP, 1991.

TUAN, Yi-Fu. *Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience*. Minneapolis, U of Minnesota P, 1977.

TURNER, Henry Gyles, and Alexander SUTHERLAND. *The Development of Australian Literature*. London, Longmans, Green, 1898.

WAGNER, Tamara S., ed. *Domestic Fiction in Colonial Australia and New Zealand*. London, Pickering & Chatto, 2014.
<figure><img src="image_15.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_15.png" /></figure>
Chapter
9

The Politics
of Displacements:
Homes within Home

Salhia Ben-Messahel
Chapter
9

The Politics
of Displacements:
Homes within Home

Salhia Ben-Messahel
<figure><img src="image_16.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_16.png" /></figure>
Chapter
9

In an interview titled "HOMInG," anthropologist and social theorist Ghassan Hage argues that the idea of a "home" is not the same as a "house" and that the issue of "home" is political considering that one's perception of home may vary according to a specific context. Hage insists on the idea that "occupying a space does not necessarily mean that you develop a homely attachment to it" ("HOMInG Interview"). Hage's arguments bring to mind Bruce Bennett's collection of essays *Homing In* published in 2006, which explores the various ways in which belonging occurs in the writings of Australian authors ranging from the colonial to the post-colonial period. In the introduction to the essays, Bennett argues that "finding a point of stability or belonging in some form of 'the local'—in a house, suburb, sea or landscape, or nation or region, for instance—can be fraught with contradictions and difficulties as well as pleasures" (2). In this article, I wish to take both Hage's and Bennett's arguments to examine the flexibility of the concept of "home" in some recent Australian fiction and see how post-colonial housing never simply translates as "residence" since it implies the transformation of borders and the complexity of boundaries (Ashcroft). Hage's insistence on "the continuous ambivalence of multiple spatiality for diasporic subjects" ("HOMInG Interview") will be explored alongside Bennett's ideas on belonging and displacement.

The perception of place and home was and still remains complex in Australia. Bill Ashcroft's critical work, *Postcolonial Transformations* (2001) astutely refers to the colonial process and to the way settler-Australia
Chapter
9

In an interview titled "HOMInG," anthropologist and social theorist Ghassan Hage argues that the idea of a "home" is not the same as a "house" and that the issue of "home" is political considering that one's perception of home may vary according to a specific context. Hage insists on the idea that "occupying a space does not necessarily mean that you develop a homely attachment to it" ("HOMInG Interview"). Hage's arguments bring to mind Bruce Bennett's collection of essays *Homing In* published in 2006, which explores the various ways in which belonging occurs in the writings of Australian authors ranging from the colonial to the post-colonial period. In the introduction to the essays, Bennett argues that "finding a point of stability or belonging in some form of 'the local'—in a house, suburb, sea or landscape, or nation or region, for instance—can be fraught with contradictions and difficulties as well as pleasures" (2). In this article, I wish to take both Hage's and Bennett's arguments to examine the flexibility of the concept of "home" in some recent Australian fiction and see how post-colonial housing never simply translates as "residence" since it implies the transformation of borders and the complexity of boundaries (Ashcroft). Hage's insistence on "the continuous ambivalence of multiple spatiality for diasporic subjects" ("HOMInG Interview") will be explored alongside Bennett's ideas on belonging and displacement.

The perception of place and home was and still remains complex in Australia. Bill Ashcroft's critical work, *Postcolonial Transformations* (2001) astutely refers to the colonial process and to the way settler-Australia
imposed a European conception of "home" and "dwelling" onto a non-European space. Indeed, as the Australian colonies expanded, the European settlers tended to transplant the European home-model and European ideal of home on an alien territory at the expense of the Indigenous people, who from a European point of view did not occupy space but rather lived within space. Indigenous people were designated as hunters and gatherers and through a European perception were viewed as a nomadic people who did not belong anywhere.<fnref n="115" /> So, as Australia expanded as a European settlement in the southern hemisphere, the settlers transplanted the European concept of "home" as much as European culture and habits. Settlers and colonizers sought to recreate a homely space in a geographic environment they saw as hostile and unhomely. In the colonial perception, the land thus needed to be tamed, and space needed to be occupied and apprehended as a new home away from Britain, the mother-country.

In Kate Grenville's novel, *The Secret River* (2005), which explores the way in which settlers coped with a new environment and went through the colonial process in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the issue of creating home is viewed from various angles so that the understanding that one has of home is dual. William and Sarah (Sal) Thornhill's respective understandings of the Australian environment are reflected in the way in which each of them, husband and wife, tends to conceptualize "home." The newly possessed land is viewed simply as "my place" by William Thornhill (144) while Sarah Thornhill tends to redesign and even map the land according to the model inherited from home, regardless of the local fauna and flora: "Within its [the yard's] boundaries she made something domestic [...]" (149-150). In her desire to set physical boundaries against the surrounding environment, the character is expressing her own colonial displacement. The outside boundaries reflect her inner emotional and psychological boundaries meant to protect her from what is becoming "home" and her new belonging. Pierre Bourdieu's notion of "habitus" is useful here since it illustrates the extent to which the environment and the place where the Thornhills settle, surface as a practice and not as a

<footnote n="115">¹¹⁵ Recent research, Bill Gamage's *The Biggest Estate on Earth* (2011) and Bruce Pascoe's *Dark Emu* (2015), nonetheless shows that in fact Indigenous Australians managed landscape, did build homes as well as sow seeds and occupy what could be seen as 'villages.'</footnote>
imposed a European conception of "home" and "dwelling" onto a non-European space. Indeed, as the Australian colonies expanded, the European settlers tended to transplant the European home-model and European ideal of home on an alien territory at the expense of the Indigenous people, who from a European point of view did not occupy space but rather lived within space. Indigenous people were designated as hunters and gatherers and through a European perception were viewed as a nomadic people who did not belong anywhere.<fnref n="115" /> So, as Australia expanded as a European settlement in the southern hemisphere, the settlers transplanted the European concept of "home" as much as European culture and habits. Settlers and colonizers sought to recreate a homely space in a geographic environment they saw as hostile and unhomely. In the colonial perception, the land thus needed to be tamed, and space needed to be occupied and apprehended as a new home away from Britain, the mother-country.

In Kate Grenville's novel, *The Secret River* (2005), which explores the way in which settlers coped with a new environment and went through the colonial process in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the issue of creating home is viewed from various angles so that the understanding that one has of home is dual. William and Sarah (Sal) Thornhill's respective understandings of the Australian environment are reflected in the way in which each of them, husband and wife, tends to conceptualize "home." The newly possessed land is viewed simply as "my place" by William Thornhill (144) while Sarah Thornhill tends to redesign and even map the land according to the model inherited from home, regardless of the local fauna and flora: "Within its [the yard's] boundaries she made something domestic [...]" (149-150). In her desire to set physical boundaries against the surrounding environment, the character is expressing her own colonial displacement. The outside boundaries reflect her inner emotional and psychological boundaries meant to protect her from what is becoming "home" and her new belonging. Pierre Bourdieu's notion of "habitus" is useful here since it illustrates the extent to which the environment and the place where the Thornhills settle, surface as a practice and not as a

<footnote n="115">¹¹⁵ Recent research, Bill Gamage's *The Biggest Estate on Earth* (2011) and Bruce Pascoe's *Dark Emu* (2015), nonetheless shows that in fact Indigenous Australians managed landscape, did build homes as well as sow seeds and occupy what could be seen as 'villages.'</footnote>
location for home. Indeed, William's settlement in the alien environment
is marked by his willingness to become an Other, that is an Australian
citizen and landowner free of the convict past, while Sarah's position
and attitude both stem from her rejection and fear of the new place
and from her belief that home is still in Britain. Sarah clings to Britain
as the home-country even when she is falling sick and envisaging her
own death: "She stared at nothing and sighed, lying stiff in the bed, and
one day said *Bury me facing the north, Will. [...] Where Home is*" (184).
William is in a state of occupancy in settler Australia while Sarah is in
a transitory state in a place she does not want to relate or belong to.
Grenville's novel shows how the reconstruction of a home away from
the home-country tended to alleviate the anxiety and alienation felt by
newcomers to Australia, how the construction of new homes provided
former convicts or settler Australians with a sense of belonging and
how it played a part in the configuration of an Australian identity in the
antipodes.

During the colonizing process, and even more so during the Federation
of Australia, issues of subjectivity and belonging were strongly bound to
the discourse on the formation of the nation. Land ownership was secured
by the imposition of architecture and housing, cities emerged along the
coasts and expanded to the homely suburbs, to such an extent that in the
aftermath of World War II, suburbia surfaced as home to working-class
culture and Australian identity. The suburb and the Australian homestead
signified in the Australian consciousness a break with Victorian homes
and epitomized Australia's post-colonial nature. Thus, "the transformation
of colonial space into post-colonial 'life-place'" occurred "through the
interaction of habitation and representation" (Ashcroft 160).

# 1. The Exploration of Australia's Colonial Backyard

In his celebrated novel, *Cloudstreet* (1991), novelist Tim Winton
delves into the space of the nation through the anthropomorphization
of an old and cranky house located in the suburb of Perth. The house,
like the geographic environment and landscape in Winton's writings,
surfaces as a main character and encapsulates the issues working-class
location for home. Indeed, William's settlement in the alien environment
is marked by his willingness to become an Other, that is an Australian
citizen and landowner free of the convict past, while Sarah's position
and attitude both stem from her rejection and fear of the new place
and from her belief that home is still in Britain. Sarah clings to Britain
as the home-country even when she is falling sick and envisaging her
own death: "She stared at nothing and sighed, lying stiff in the bed, and
one day said *Bury me facing the north, Will. [...] Where Home is*" (184).
William is in a state of occupancy in settler Australia while Sarah is in
a transitory state in a place she does not want to relate or belong to.
Grenville's novel shows how the reconstruction of a home away from
the home-country tended to alleviate the anxiety and alienation felt by
newcomers to Australia, how the construction of new homes provided
former convicts or settler Australians with a sense of belonging and
how it played a part in the configuration of an Australian identity in the
antipodes.

During the colonizing process, and even more so during the Federation
of Australia, issues of subjectivity and belonging were strongly bound to
the discourse on the formation of the nation. Land ownership was secured
by the imposition of architecture and housing, cities emerged along the
coasts and expanded to the homely suburbs, to such an extent that in the
aftermath of World War II, suburbia surfaced as home to working-class
culture and Australian identity. The suburb and the Australian homestead
signified in the Australian consciousness a break with Victorian homes
and epitomized Australia's post-colonial nature. Thus, "the transformation
of colonial space into post-colonial 'life-place'" occurred "through the
interaction of habitation and representation" (Ashcroft 160).

# 1. The Exploration of Australia's Colonial Backyard

In his celebrated novel, *Cloudstreet* (1991), novelist Tim Winton
delves into the space of the nation through the anthropomorphization
of an old and cranky house located in the suburb of Perth. The house,
like the geographic environment and landscape in Winton's writings,
surfaces as a main character and encapsulates the issues working-class
Australians were faced with between the 1940s and 1960s. Speaking about the novel, Winton insists on the complex nature of the house as a signifier for subjectivity and highlights its intricate (almost umbilical) bond with the characters:

> Here's two families, against their wills, they go to a strange other
> place, and they settle in this house, which has lost its innocence and
> doesn't want them, and they don't like it, and they spend the rest
> of their life trying to belong.... After a while the house has come to
> seem normal and natural and important to them. Perhaps this is my
> sentimental hopefulness about the nation. (Niekerk)

The house, which is first introduced as home to the Lambs and Pickles,
the two dysfunctional families, very soon operates as a space that the
characters occupy owing to their social situation and not as a home. It
only becomes a home through the relations that characters can have
with it through experience. Commonly called N°1 Cloudstreet, the house
naturally operates as a metaphorical space for Australian society, it also
encapsulates the characters' personal stories and uncovers the hidden
stories related to Indigenous people and to the colonial past. Thus, in
the relational experience between the house and the characters, the
historical and political nature of home surfaces to deconstruct the ideal
of the nation and modernity. The ghostly figures of young Indigenous
girls suddenly appear in the house in an attempt to restore the reality
of place and history, especially the story of the Stolen Generations, of
the young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island children who were forcibly
removed from their homes between 1910 and the 1970s under various
government policies, to be assimilated into white society. The occupancy
of the ghosts places the main characters in the house as their being at
home (the place where they had been brought in after they had been
taken away from their families) while the Lambs and Pickles have to adjust
to the house to feel at home. The house, which is a centre of historical
reality, operates both as a character and as an exterior narrator, a literary
device that provides extra-information to the reader, information that
the two families themselves seem to ignore. For instance, when Fish
Australians were faced with between the 1940s and 1960s. Speaking about the novel, Winton insists on the complex nature of the house as a signifier for subjectivity and highlights its intricate (almost umbilical) bond with the characters:

> Here's two families, against their wills, they go to a strange other
> place, and they settle in this house, which has lost its innocence and
> doesn't want them, and they don't like it, and they spend the rest
> of their life trying to belong.... After a while the house has come to
> seem normal and natural and important to them. Perhaps this is my
> sentimental hopefulness about the nation. (Niekerk)

The house, which is first introduced as home to the Lambs and Pickles,
the two dysfunctional families, very soon operates as a space that the
characters occupy owing to their social situation and not as a home. It
only becomes a home through the relations that characters can have
with it through experience. Commonly called N°1 Cloudstreet, the house
naturally operates as a metaphorical space for Australian society, it also
encapsulates the characters' personal stories and uncovers the hidden
stories related to Indigenous people and to the colonial past. Thus, in
the relational experience between the house and the characters, the
historical and political nature of home surfaces to deconstruct the ideal
of the nation and modernity. The ghostly figures of young Indigenous
girls suddenly appear in the house in an attempt to restore the reality
of place and history, especially the story of the Stolen Generations, of
the young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island children who were forcibly
removed from their homes between 1910 and the 1970s under various
government policies, to be assimilated into white society. The occupancy
of the ghosts places the main characters in the house as their being at
home (the place where they had been brought in after they had been
taken away from their families) while the Lambs and Pickles have to adjust
to the house to feel at home. The house, which is a centre of historical
reality, operates both as a character and as an exterior narrator, a literary
device that provides extra-information to the reader, information that
the two families themselves seem to ignore. For instance, when Fish
Lamb, the retarded boy, feels the presence and hears the voices of dead Indigenous girls, he is provided with details about the Stolen Generation he does not understand but which the reader does. In such a scene, Fish Lamb is both in place (location) and out of place (home), the house being the *Heimlich* and *Unheimlich*. The uncanny nature of home tends to revolve around Gaston Bachelard's interpretation of the house and home as topo-analysis so that memories of the house, along with the memory of the ghostly Indigenous girls within the home, are entangled in the present of the main characters and are thus part of their ongoing experience and evolving subjectivity. As Bachelard asks:

> how can secret rooms, rooms that have disappeared, become abodes
> for an unforgettable past? Where and how does repose find especially
> conducive situations? How is it that, at times, a provisional refuge
> or an occasional shelter is endowed in our intimate day-dreaming
> with virtues that have no objective foundation? With the house
> image we are in possession of a veritable principle of psychological
> integration. Descriptive psychology, depth psychology, psychoanalysis
> and phenomenology could constitute, with the house, the corpus of
> doctrines that I have designated by the name of topo-analysis. On
> whatever theoretical horizon we examine it, the house image would
> appear to have become the topography of our intimate being. (xxxvi)

In dealing with place, sacredness and identity in the postcolonial
nation, Winton's story suggests that "in a new environment of determining
rights over land, what is 'ours' is also potentially, or even always already,
'theirs', and a previously 'private' Aboriginal sacred enters the public
realm in diverse ways" (Gelder and Jacobs 23). The narrative balances
the various notions of "home," referring either to "habitation," "shelter,"
or to "national/political and cultural space," in an attempt to re-instate
what was deliberately erased from the pages of Australia's history. Fish
Lamb insists that the house is a living entity, that it is much more than
just land or property: "The house sad, Lestah ... It talks. ... It hurts" (166).
In saying so, the character suggests that the "theory of place does not
propose a simple separation between the 'place' named and described in
Lamb, the retarded boy, feels the presence and hears the voices of dead Indigenous girls, he is provided with details about the Stolen Generation he does not understand but which the reader does. In such a scene, Fish Lamb is both in place (location) and out of place (home), the house being the *Heimlich* and *Unheimlich*. The uncanny nature of home tends to revolve around Gaston Bachelard's interpretation of the house and home as topo-analysis so that memories of the house, along with the memory of the ghostly Indigenous girls within the home, are entangled in the present of the main characters and are thus part of their ongoing experience and evolving subjectivity. As Bachelard asks:

> how can secret rooms, rooms that have disappeared, become abodes
> for an unforgettable past? Where and how does repose find especially
> conducive situations? How is it that, at times, a provisional refuge
> or an occasional shelter is endowed in our intimate day-dreaming
> with virtues that have no objective foundation? With the house
> image we are in possession of a veritable principle of psychological
> integration. Descriptive psychology, depth psychology, psychoanalysis
> and phenomenology could constitute, with the house, the corpus of
> doctrines that I have designated by the name of topo-analysis. On
> whatever theoretical horizon we examine it, the house image would
> appear to have become the topography of our intimate being. (xxxvi)

In dealing with place, sacredness and identity in the postcolonial
nation, Winton's story suggests that "in a new environment of determining
rights over land, what is 'ours' is also potentially, or even always already,
'theirs', and a previously 'private' Aboriginal sacred enters the public
realm in diverse ways" (Gelder and Jacobs 23). The narrative balances
the various notions of "home," referring either to "habitation," "shelter,"
or to "national/political and cultural space," in an attempt to re-instate
what was deliberately erased from the pages of Australia's history. Fish
Lamb insists that the house is a living entity, that it is much more than
just land or property: "The house sad, Lestah ... It talks. ... It hurts" (166).
In saying so, the character suggests that the "theory of place does not
propose a simple separation between the 'place' named and described in
language, and some 'real' place accessible to it, but rather indicates that
in some sense place is language, something in constant flux, a discourse
in process" (Ashcroft 155).

The shifting nature of home which illustrates Winton's novel also
surfaces in Nikki Gemmell's novel, *Cleave* (1998), to explore the belonging
of characters to place and the issue of land's rights. The main character,
Snip Freeman, is depicted as "a wanderer" (3) who never associates with
home since home is everywhere in the deserted areas of the Australian
outback. The depiction of the central and deserted areas of Australia,
around Alice Springs, forming what is often referred to as "the Dead
Heart,"<fnref n="116" /> relies on the importance of geography and topography. The
central desert is both home to Indigenous culture and to the charac-
ter's formation as a hybrid subject while the family-home epitomizes
settler-Australia, the settler's wrong perception of landscape: "A house
that never celebrated the land it was on. A family home firmly shut to
the world" (82). The family-house is clearly not a home to the character
but rather a place of enclosure.

The novel, published at a time when Australia had started to
question issues of land's rights, issues that still are central in Australian
discourse and politics, debunks the idea that one can have of "home"
and suggests that landscape, the environment is to be apprehended
in almost the Indigenous sense as "country," which encompasses the
reciprocal relationship between the land and the individual. Thus, not
only is the outback a home and centre of reality for the main character
but the geography and the topography of place both tend to surface
as discursive spaces. The main character's interaction and connection
with indigeneity is perceived in her being accepted as early as the age
of seven, being given the skin name of "Napaljarri" and travelling back
to the Indigenous Yapa community: "But Snip only fleetingly comes back
to this place that feels like home, the land that's a tonic to replenish
her spirit" (68). The cultural and social interaction which the character

<footnote n="116">¹¹⁶ The expression was used by J. W. Gregory, Professor of geology at the University of Glasgow in his book *The Dead Heart of Australia. A Journey around Lake Eyre in the Summer of 1901-1902, with some Account of the Lake Eyre Basin and the Flowing Wells of Central Australia* (1906). It is also the name of a famous song by Midnight Oil, the Australian music band, a song dealing with the mistreatment of Indigenous Australians and the non-recognition of Indigenous cultures.</footnote>
language, and some 'real' place accessible to it, but rather indicates that
in some sense place is language, something in constant flux, a discourse
in process" (Ashcroft 155).

The shifting nature of home which illustrates Winton's novel also
surfaces in Nikki Gemmell's novel, *Cleave* (1998), to explore the belonging
of characters to place and the issue of land's rights. The main character,
Snip Freeman, is depicted as "a wanderer" (3) who never associates with
home since home is everywhere in the deserted areas of the Australian
outback. The depiction of the central and deserted areas of Australia,
around Alice Springs, forming what is often referred to as "the Dead
Heart,"<fnref n="116" /> relies on the importance of geography and topography. The
central desert is both home to Indigenous culture and to the charac-
ter's formation as a hybrid subject while the family-home epitomizes
settler-Australia, the settler's wrong perception of landscape: "A house
that never celebrated the land it was on. A family home firmly shut to
the world" (82). The family-house is clearly not a home to the character
but rather a place of enclosure.

The novel, published at a time when Australia had started to
question issues of land's rights, issues that still are central in Australian
discourse and politics, debunks the idea that one can have of "home"
and suggests that landscape, the environment is to be apprehended
in almost the Indigenous sense as "country," which encompasses the
reciprocal relationship between the land and the individual. Thus, not
only is the outback a home and centre of reality for the main character
but the geography and the topography of place both tend to surface
as discursive spaces. The main character's interaction and connection
with indigeneity is perceived in her being accepted as early as the age
of seven, being given the skin name of "Napaljarri" and travelling back
to the Indigenous Yapa community: "But Snip only fleetingly comes back
to this place that feels like home, the land that's a tonic to replenish
her spirit" (68). The cultural and social interaction which the character

<footnote n="116">¹¹⁶ The expression was used by J. W. Gregory, Professor of geology at the University of Glasgow in his book *The Dead Heart of Australia. A Journey around Lake Eyre in the Summer of 1901-1902, with some Account of the Lake Eyre Basin and the Flowing Wells of Central Australia* (1906). It is also the name of a famous song by Midnight Oil, the Australian music band, a song dealing with the mistreatment of Indigenous Australians and the non-recognition of Indigenous cultures.</footnote>
sustains with the community shows how “country,” Yapa country, is
“a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness,
and a will toward life,” that “country is home, and peace; nourishment for
body, mind, and spirit; heart’s ease” (Rose 1997).

While Gemmell's novel may indirectly anticipate Germaine Greer's appeal, at a later stage, that non-Indigenous Australians should embrace Indigenous culture as their own (Greer 2003)—an appeal which raised many concerns about cultural appropriation—the story tends to explore national history and personal story through landscape in such a way that Snip Freeman, who has a nomadic lifestyle, is fashioned by the earth, dependent upon the earth:

Snip is slapped and steaked by red dust in this place, the tips of her
fingers are valleyed as if all fluid has been drained from them, her long
hair as weighted with smoke and dirt and wind, there are compacted
crescents of dust under her nails, vivid accumulations between her
fingers and toes, and in the palm of each hand a river map of ochre
lines. She's stinky in this place, sweaty and smoky. She's manless
and motherless in this place. She's been ordered to come here.
The land where the light hurts is beyond the bulletproof glass and
beyond the bulletproof glass, touching lightly the earth of the Tanami
Desert, is a scattering of houses and humpies. (Gemmell 52)

This passage encapsulates the character's umbilical connection to the
land and suggests that it bears an imprint on her subjectivity rather
than the opposite—to such an extent that one could argue that in
such a scene, the landscape is decolonized and absorbs the Anglo-
Australian subject through a process of assimilation. In the novel, the
understanding of subjectivity operates through constant movements
of territorialization and deterritorialization to such an extent that the
main character "does not move to a dwelling but dwells by moving, that
is, by transition from place to place within (or again, as) a region" (Casey
2009). The main character's sense of belonging is subtly manifested in
a space that "envisages forms in motion and in relation to other forms,
one in which both geography and history are territories to be travelled"
sustains with the community shows how “country,” Yapa country, is
“a living entity with a yesterday, today and tomorrow, with a consciousness,
and a will toward life,” that “country is home, and peace; nourishment for
body, mind, and spirit; heart’s ease” (Rose 1997).

While Gemmell's novel may indirectly anticipate Germaine Greer's
appeal, at a later stage, that non-Indigenous Australians should embrace
Indigenous culture as their own (Greer 2003)—an appeal which raised
many concerns about cultural appropriation—the story tends to explore
national history and personal story through landscape in such a way that
Snip Freeman, who has a nomadic lifestyle, is fashioned by the earth,
dependent upon the earth:

Snip is slapped and steaked by red dust in this place, the tips of her
fingers are valleyed as if all fluid has been drained from them, her long
hair as weighted with smoke and dirt and wind, there are compacted
crescents of dust under her nails, vivid accumulations between her
fingers and toes, and in the palm of each hand a river map of ochre
lines. She's stinky in this place, sweaty and smoky. She's manless
and motherless in this place. She's been ordered to come here.
The land where the light hurts is beyond the bulletproof glass and
beyond the bulletproof glass, touching lightly the earth of the Tanami
Desert, is a scattering of houses and humpies. (Gemmell 52)

This passage encapsulates the character's umbilical connection to the
land and suggests that it bears an imprint on her subjectivity rather
than the opposite—to such an extent that one could argue that in
such a scene, the landscape is decolonized and absorbs the Anglo-
Australian subject through a process of assimilation. In the novel, the
understanding of subjectivity operates through constant movements
of territorialization and deterritorialization to such an extent that the
main character "does not move to a dwelling but dwells by moving, that
is, by transition from place to place within (or again, as) a region" (Casey
2009). The main character's sense of belonging is subtly manifested in
a space that "envisages forms in motion and in relation to other forms,
one in which both geography and history are territories to be travelled"
(Bourriaud 117) and never owned. In fact, beyond its interest in the relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia, Gemmell's novel suggests that in post-colonial Australia, the politics of "home" is still fraught with tensions, especially when defining what is "home" and "for whom?"

## 2. Home away from the Mother-Country

Ghassan Hage's perception that "there is a genealogy of thoughts between ways of inhabiting and habits" ("HOMInG Interview") is essential to the examination of writings dealing with migration and migrant integration in multicultural Australia. Despite Australia's multicultural framework, its economic and political integration within the Asia-Pacific region, migrant and refugee issues have tended to surface as a challenging force within fiction to subvert the politics of home and the multicultural country.

Displacement and un-belonging are recurrent themes and necessary processes in the work of Eva Sallis Hornung, especially when looking at the inclusion of the migrant other in multicultural Australia. A novelist and strong advocate for human rights, Sallis Hornung explores migrancy and the instability of home through the displacements of characters within and outside of Australia, characters who tend to be caught between divergent but nonetheless concomitant physical and psychological spaces. In her first novel *Hiam* (1998), the meanderings in the desert and bush areas of Hiam, a Middle Eastern female character, serve as a pretext to analyse the processes by which one feels at home and by which one relates to home. The character reminisces on her personal experiences, her life in Yemen and arrival in Australia, which operate around the issue of home: "Marriage, birth, emigration. It seems quite appropriate that life with Zena and Masoud meant a place, completely different. Adelaide, her brother-in-law's house, then this house, *our house*" (11). The stress laid on the house through the use of italics suggests that the claiming of being home, signified as "our house," is shifting and dependent upon what Hage interprets as "the double tie between the small and large scale of home, as much as there is a tie between here and there, origin and destination contexts" ("HOMInG Interview").
(Bourriaud 117) and never owned. In fact, beyond its interest in the relations between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australia, Gemmell's novel suggests that in post-colonial Australia, the politics of "home" is still fraught with tensions, especially when defining what is "home" and "for whom?"

## 2. Home away from the Mother-Country

Ghassan Hage's perception that "there is a genealogy of thoughts between ways of inhabiting and habits" ("HOMInG Interview") is essential to the examination of writings dealing with migration and migrant integration in multicultural Australia. Despite Australia's multicultural framework, its economic and political integration within the Asia-Pacific region, migrant and refugee issues have tended to surface as a challenging force within fiction to subvert the politics of home and the multicultural country.

Displacement and un-belonging are recurrent themes and necessary processes in the work of Eva Sallis Hornung, especially when looking at the inclusion of the migrant other in multicultural Australia. A novelist and strong advocate for human rights, Sallis Hornung explores migrancy and the instability of home through the displacements of characters within and outside of Australia, characters who tend to be caught between divergent but nonetheless concomitant physical and psychological spaces. In her first novel *Hiam* (1998), the meanderings in the desert and bush areas of Hiam, a Middle Eastern female character, serve as a pretext to analyse the processes by which one feels at home and by which one relates to home. The character reminisces on her personal experiences, her life in Yemen and arrival in Australia, which operate around the issue of home: "Marriage, birth, emigration. It seems quite appropriate that life with Zena and Masoud meant a place, completely different. Adelaide, her brother-in-law's house, then this house, *our house*" (11). The stress laid on the house through the use of italics suggests that the claiming of being home, signified as "our house," is shifting and dependent upon what Hage interprets as "the double tie between the small and large scale of home, as much as there is a tie between here and there, origin and destination contexts" ("HOMInG Interview").
Home is both the place left behind in Yemen and the new place in Adelaide, both synonymous with loss and chaos while the rural and deserted areas in the Northern Territory reflect the character's sense of being in the world. The Australian outback represents an alternative space—and a Bhabhan third space where dialogue between cultures evolve—to the character's personal experience; it operates as a liberating device, a centre of reality to the alien and alienated character: “She was outside or more outside of something she had been in which had also been an exile from something else” (3). Hiam is only able to confront her own marginal position in Australia and the dramatic successive losses of both her daughter and husband, when she is in the central desert and confronted to her own nothingness.

The encounter and connection of Hiam, who is perceived as the “oriental” migrant other, with Indigenous Australia subtly operates through the overlaying of a geographic space marked by Indigenous songlines, the dreaming tracks and living narratives of the first inhabitants, and a personal space marked by the intertextual resurgence of stories that are reminiscent of *The Arabian Nights*. Place and the location of home are thus conceptualized through a network of relationships and stories that are constantly negotiated. In fact, the character’s experience puts in perspective antinomian spaces, the East and the West—even if the part of the West (post-colonial Australia) is yet (dis)placed in the Asia-Pacific region—while at the same time juxtaposing those two geopolitical spaces (East/West) with the inner country, the outback as the space of Indigenous history and truth. Hiam’s memory and dreams compel her to travel back and forth between home in Adelaide and home in Yemen despite her being positioned in place in the Australian outback. The character’s constant shift between various homes emphasizes the plural nature of home and the idea that the definition of home relies on how an individual may apprehend “home” according to a particular situation: being a wife and mother, or a migrant or a multicultural other. In her second novel, *The City of Sealions* (2002), Sallis Hornung again tackles the issue of displacement through three distinctive geographic spaces: insular Australia, mainland Australia and Yemen. The experience of Lian, a young student who leaves her island home, off the coast of South
Home is both the place left behind in Yemen and the new place in Adelaide, both synonymous with loss and chaos while the rural and deserted areas in the Northern Territory reflect the character's sense of being in the world. The Australian outback represents an alternative space—and a Bhabhan third space where dialogue between cultures evolve—to the character's personal experience; it operates as a liberating device, a centre of reality to the alien and alienated character: “She was outside or more outside of something she had been in which had also been an exile from something else” (3). Hiam is only able to confront her own marginal position in Australia and the dramatic successive losses of both her daughter and husband, when she is in the central desert and confronted to her own nothingness.

The encounter and connection of Hiam, who is perceived as the “oriental” migrant other, with Indigenous Australia subtly operates through the overlaying of a geographic space marked by Indigenous songlines, the dreaming tracks and living narratives of the first inhabitants, and a personal space marked by the intertextual resurgence of stories that are reminiscent of *The Arabian Nights*. Place and the location of home are thus conceptualized through a network of relationships and stories that are constantly negotiated. In fact, the character’s experience puts in perspective antinomian spaces, the East and the West—even if the part of the West (post-colonial Australia) is yet (dis)placed in the Asia-Pacific region—while at the same time juxtaposing those two geopolitical spaces (East/West) with the inner country, the outback as the space of Indigenous history and truth. Hiam’s memory and dreams compel her to travel back and forth between home in Adelaide and home in Yemen despite her being positioned in place in the Australian outback. The character’s constant shift between various homes emphasizes the plural nature of home and the idea that the definition of home relies on how an individual may apprehend “home” according to a particular situation: being a wife and mother, or a migrant or a multicultural other. In her second novel, *The City of Sealions* (2002), Sallis Hornung again tackles the issue of displacement through three distinctive geographic spaces: insular Australia, mainland Australia and Yemen. The experience of Lian, a young student who leaves her island home, off the coast of South
Australia, to study Arabic and absorb a new culture in Yemen, brings to the fore clashing cultures, intercultural relations and ethnic identity. The main character's experience, which owes much to her wish to escape from the heavy load of her mother's past and personal history, lays emphasis on the difficulty at defining "home" and thus on the divergent definitions and understandings one has of home. Lian's desire to cling to her settler heritage, on her father's part, "being an islander and an Australian" (5), points to her hybrid subjectivity and yet exposes her rejection of her Vietnamese cultural heritage on her mother's side. On the other hand, her desire to be home—"why can't one be at home anywhere?" (81)—relies on her inability to feel at home both on her native island and in Australia. Despite her identification with Australian culture, mainly her islander culture, and with the fishing community her father's family is from, Lian is nonetheless perceived as an Other, on the margins of the mainstream. Her uncle, just like other members of the small community, does tend to place her outside of the mainstream: "'You're so like your mother,' Mal says to Lian's flouncing teenage self. [...] you're both mean and nasty buggers with a hell of a stubborn exterior. You've got the motherlode running through ya, ..." (6).

The relationship that Lian has with her mother is central to the plot and illustrates the understanding of home that the characters have. The personal experiences of the migrant subject, the mother, a Vietnamese other and refugee, work contrapuntally so that feeling exiled and feeling at home concur.

Ghassan Hage's analysis of the nature of diasporic existence as taking a lenticular form is useful since the concept of home operates through the lenticular, the image that appears differently depending on how one looks at it. Hage argues that "in contrast to the single image/reality captured in the common photograph the lenticular surface contains a multiplicity of images/realities that reveal themselves perspectively and are continuously flickering and speaking to each other" ("Existential Territories"). Thus, in the novel, home cannot be synonymous with fixity since wandering is a human condition. Home can thus only be apprehended through displacement and from multiple perspectives. When the main character settles in Saana, Yemen, she soon perceives her new foreign environment as home, as a
Australia, to study Arabic and absorb a new culture in Yemen, brings to the fore clashing cultures, intercultural relations and ethnic identity. The main character's experience, which owes much to her wish to escape from the heavy load of her mother's past and personal history, lays emphasis on the difficulty at defining "home" and thus on the divergent definitions and understandings one has of home. Lian's desire to cling to her settler heritage, on her father's part, "being an islander and an Australian" (5), points to her hybrid subjectivity and yet exposes her rejection of her Vietnamese cultural heritage on her mother's side. On the other hand, her desire to be home—"why can't one be at home anywhere?" (81)—relies on her inability to feel at home both on her native island and in Australia. Despite her identification with Australian culture, mainly her islander culture, and with the fishing community her father's family is from, Lian is nonetheless perceived as an Other, on the margins of the mainstream. Her uncle, just like other members of the small community, does tend to place her outside of the mainstream: "'You're so like your mother,' Mal says to Lian's flouncing teenage self. [...] you're both mean and nasty buggers with a hell of a stubborn exterior. You've got the motherlode running through ya, ..." (6).

The relationship that Lian has with her mother is central to the plot and illustrates the understanding of home that the characters have. The personal experiences of the migrant subject, the mother, a Vietnamese other and refugee, work contrapuntally so that feeling exiled and feeling at home concur.

Ghassan Hage's analysis of the nature of diasporic existence as taking a lenticular form is useful since the concept of home operates through the lenticular, the image that appears differently depending on how one looks at it. Hage argues that "in contrast to the single image/reality captured in the common photograph the lenticular surface contains a multiplicity of images/realities that reveal themselves perspectively and are continuously flickering and speaking to each other" ("Existential Territories"). Thus, in the novel, home cannot be synonymous with fixity since wandering is a human condition. Home can thus only be apprehended through displacement and from multiple perspectives. When the main character settles in Saana, Yemen, she soon perceives her new foreign environment as home, as a
space where she can embrace her Australianness without having to justify
her Asian background. The various locations used as homes, away from the
past and the family-home, tend to surface through a syncretic vision of
reality and subjectivity. When Lian leaves her lover to move into the Jewish
quarter (175), she metaphorically becomes the figure of the "wandering
Jew," an outcast within Yemeni society in the same way she is when at
home in Australia. The architecture of her new home may symbolically
design the complexities of her life, her inner space and state of mind:

Her house leaned against the house behind it, even fitted into it like
a Chinese puzzle or a lopsided piece of joinery. Its off-perpendicular
walls seemed to settle backward slightly, slumped and tired. It had
a distinct belly, perhaps from an age rather than architecture. The
interpenetrated houses of the quarter huddled blindly together,
hugging each other, warding off erosion, trying to be blind to time.
... But a house could not stave off what was coming. She could hear
the wet slap slap slap of Vietnam, the spaces and faces she had
never let in. (176)

The design and features of Lian's house, the building that stands as the
location of home, along with the other houses in the area, foreshadow
the character's own desire to move away from her past and family
history but also reflect her own dislocation and impossibility at escaping
from home in Australia as conveyed through the sounds emerging from
her Vietnamese heritage. While identity is performed through exile
and within an alter space, the character's existence seems to draw
on Homi Bhabha's theorization of the "unhomely" understood not as a
state of lacking home, or the opposite of having a home, but rather as
the recognition that the frontier between the world and the home is
breaking down. As Bhabha puts it, in "displacement the border between
the home and the world becomes confused; and, uncannily, the private
and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that
is as divided as it is disorienting" (9). Moreover, the gradual interweaving
of past and present experiences is emphasized by the associations that
Lian makes between home in Australia and her new home in Yemen, by
space where she can embrace her Australianness without having to justify
her Asian background. The various locations used as homes, away from the
past and the family-home, tend to surface through a syncretic vision of
reality and subjectivity. When Lian leaves her lover to move into the Jewish
quarter (175), she metaphorically becomes the figure of the "wandering
Jew," an outcast within Yemeni society in the same way she is when at
home in Australia. The architecture of her new home may symbolically
design the complexities of her life, her inner space and state of mind:

Her house leaned against the house behind it, even fitted into it like
a Chinese puzzle or a lopsided piece of joinery. Its off-perpendicular
walls seemed to settle backward slightly, slumped and tired. It had
a distinct belly, perhaps from an age rather than architecture. The
interpenetrated houses of the quarter huddled blindly together,
hugging each other, warding off erosion, trying to be blind to time.
... But a house could not stave off what was coming. She could hear
the wet slap slap slap of Vietnam, the spaces and faces she had
never let in. (176)

The design and features of Lian's house, the building that stands as the
location of home, along with the other houses in the area, foreshadow
the character's own desire to move away from her past and family
history but also reflect her own dislocation and impossibility at escaping
from home in Australia as conveyed through the sounds emerging from
her Vietnamese heritage. While identity is performed through exile
and within an alter space, the character's existence seems to draw
on Homi Bhabha's theorization of the "unhomely" understood not as a
state of lacking home, or the opposite of having a home, but rather as
the recognition that the frontier between the world and the home is
breaking down. As Bhabha puts it, in "displacement the border between
the home and the world becomes confused; and, uncannily, the private
and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that
is as divided as it is disorienting" (9). Moreover, the gradual interweaving
of past and present experiences is emphasized by the associations that
Lian makes between home in Australia and her new home in Yemen, by
the many angles through which she constructs an image (and definition) of home. These experiences may again rely on what Hage identifies as "lenticular analytics" ("Existential Territories") considering that migration and subjectivity are apprehended and understood through a transnational or cosmopolitan space that supersedes the "home and away" binary common in diaspora discourse. Hence, the narrative not only accentuates the dark side of multicultural associations and constructions but, above all, suggests that homeliness intrinsically co-exists with unhomeliness. Thus, the character's perception of her own alterity and idea of home seem to rely on Paul Gilroy's idea of the "geometry of colonial power," which is "notable for the stress it placed on recognition and interdependency and the way it pushed cultural questions to the fore: each racial and ethnic type turns out to have its own space where it is at home and can be itself" (51). Lian, just like her mother, seems to be caught in the geometry of a postcolonial power that tends to discard otherness under the guise of multiculturalism.

In balancing issues of home through the lenses, past and present, of place (Australia-Yemen-Vietnam), the story delves into the paradigm of multiculturalism and exposes the discriminating aspect that multiculturalism seems to encapsulate. Speaking about language, culture and identity, Eva Sallis Hornung insists that in Australia the "word multicultural doesn't manage. Multicultural is used to mean some of our [Australia's] cultures, not all of them. Ethnic means some of our ethnicities and not others. Further, each community and each age group have different specifications as to which cultural or racial groups are them, not us" ("Australian Dream"). The novelist's words suggest that the multicultural nation is, to use Hage's word "monolithic" ("HOMInG Interview"). Furthermore, her perception of multiculturalism harks back to the formation of settler Australia as a far-flung outpost of Britain and Europe, on the border of the Asian continent.

## 3. Reconfiguring Home

The place of Australia within the Asia-Pacific region and the ties that Australia may have with the Middle East are central to the work of Sallis-Hornung and to the work of some authors who do not relate or
the many angles through which she constructs an image (and definition) of home. These experiences may again rely on what Hage identifies as "lenticular analytics" ("Existential Territories") considering that migration and subjectivity are apprehended and understood through a transnational or cosmopolitan space that supersedes the "home and away" binary common in diaspora discourse. Hence, the narrative not only accentuates the dark side of multicultural associations and constructions but, above all, suggests that homeliness intrinsically co-exists with unhomeliness. Thus, the character's perception of her own alterity and idea of home seem to rely on Paul Gilroy's idea of the "geometry of colonial power," which is "notable for the stress it placed on recognition and interdependency and the way it pushed cultural questions to the fore: each racial and ethnic type turns out to have its own space where it is at home and can be itself" (51). Lian, just like her mother, seems to be caught in the geometry of a postcolonial power that tends to discard otherness under the guise of multiculturalism.

In balancing issues of home through the lenses, past and present, of place (Australia-Yemen-Vietnam), the story delves into the paradigm of multiculturalism and exposes the discriminating aspect that multiculturalism seems to encapsulate. Speaking about language, culture and identity, Eva Sallis Hornung insists that in Australia the "word multicultural doesn't manage. Multicultural is used to mean some of our [Australia's] cultures, not all of them. Ethnic means some of our ethnicities and not others. Further, each community and each age group have different specifications as to which cultural or racial groups are them, not us" ("Australian Dream"). The novelist's words suggest that the multicultural nation is, to use Hage's word "monolithic" ("HOMInG Interview"). Furthermore, her perception of multiculturalism harks back to the formation of settler Australia as a far-flung outpost of Britain and Europe, on the border of the Asian continent.

### 3. Reconfiguring Home

The place of Australia within the Asia-Pacific region and the ties that Australia may have with the Middle East are central to the work of Sallis-Hornung and to the work of some authors who do not relate or
relate in part to Britain and Europe. Authors whose work explore the meaning of being Asian-Australian. Bruce Bennett, in his critical book titled *Homing In* explores the place of Asia in multicultural Australia and refers to the novelist and essayist Brian Castro, and his plea against Eurocentric and neoconservative discourses in media and political circles:

> ... Australia ... has written off Asia for almost 200 years; written off the countries of Asia, with various cultural traditions of thousands of years. Perhaps it is time to write 'Asia', to write within it and of it, rather than just about it. The word Asia is found after all, in the word Australia. If Australia wants to refigure itself in its relationship to the countries of Asia, to become part of Asia, as it were, then Asia must also be part of Australia. (207)

In this statement, Castro, whose writings focus on hybridity, seems to call for a reconfiguration of space through the reterritorialization of Australia within the space of the Asia-Pacific region, advocating a movement backward whereby Australia would embrace Asia as a part of home. Like Castro, other authors have shown an interest in the place of Asia within Australia and have sought to demonstrate that while Asia is still often viewed as the unknown, mysterious and oriental Other against which Australian culture had defined itself since Federation, Asia nonetheless operates as a counter-discourse to the ideologies of the nation. Nicolas Jose, who used to work as a cultural counsellor in China once referred to Sang Ye, a Chinese journalist, to insist on Australia's ties to China:

> The Chinese-Australian writer Sang Ye calls Chinatown 'a flowerpot simply placed here', where no one puts down roots, because 'the soil in the flowerpot is segregated from the soil here' (The Finish Line, 1995). But that's only part of the story. That flowerpot has been in Australia as long as any European garden. ("What is a Chinese Garden?")

Jose's use of the botanical imagery of plants and roots to describe the place of China within Australia echoes with Edouard Glissant's relational poetics whereby Chinese migration is part of the formation of the
relate in part to Britain and Europe. Authors whose work explore the meaning of being Asian-Australian. Bruce Bennett, in his critical book titled *Homing In* explores the place of Asia in multicultural Australia and refers to the novelist and essayist Brian Castro, and his plea against Eurocentric and neoconservative discourses in media and political circles:

> ... Australia ... has written off Asia for almost 200 years; written off the countries of Asia, with various cultural traditions of thousands of years. Perhaps it is time to write 'Asia', to write within it and of it, rather than just about it. The word Asia is found after all, in the word Australia. If Australia wants to refigure itself in its relationship to the countries of Asia, to become part of Asia, as it were, then Asia must also be part of Australia. (207)

In this statement, Castro, whose writings focus on hybridity, seems to call for a reconfiguration of space through the reterritorialization of Australia within the space of the Asia-Pacific region, advocating a movement backward whereby Australia would embrace Asia as a part of home. Like Castro, other authors have shown an interest in the place of Asia within Australia and have sought to demonstrate that while Asia is still often viewed as the unknown, mysterious and oriental Other against which Australian culture had defined itself since Federation, Asia nonetheless operates as a counter-discourse to the ideologies of the nation. Nicolas Jose, who used to work as a cultural counsellor in China once referred to Sang Ye, a Chinese journalist, to insist on Australia's ties to China:

> The Chinese-Australian writer Sang Ye calls Chinatown 'a flowerpot simply placed here', where no one puts down roots, because 'the soil in the flowerpot is segregated from the soil here' (The Finish Line, 1995). But that's only part of the story. That flowerpot has been in Australia as long as any European garden. ("What is a Chinese Garden?")

Jose's use of the botanical imagery of plants and roots to describe the place of China within Australia echoes with Edouard Glissant's relational poetics whereby Chinese migration is part of the formation of the
nation, the "flowerpot" being a receptacle and an actor in the process
of the relation between China and Australia, "a sort of consciousness of
consciousness," turning each individual "into a disconcerted actor in the
poetics of relation" (Glissant 27).

In his address on art in Chinatown, Sydney, Jose metaphorically
highlights the negation of the Asian presence in Australia as early as
the British settlement of the country in the 18th century and calls for a
reconfiguration of national history. In his novel *The Red Thread* (2000)
he focuses on the relations between China and Australia and through the
dynamic of intercultural relations explores Asian-Australian encounters.
The love-story between Shen Fuling, a Chinese art dealer educated in
the US, and Ruth Garrett, an Anglo-Australian artist, in the present is
intertwined with the ancient tale of two lovers, Shen Fu, a young Chinese
poet and painter, and Yün, his beloved wife, in eighteenth century imperial
China. The story not only connects Asia with Australia but also overlays
Chinese concepts of space onto Western ones in a process of creation of
new transcultural forms within the contact zone of encounters between
the past and the present:

> His (old Weng) parting advice to the young man was that the book
> might be medicine too. In that original narrative was a trace they
> must follow. Since it was working its way through their lives, they
> had no choice. It was deep, the old man said. He could see it clearly
> himself. It was certain, however, that they must find their way to
> the true end of the story. This was the path they must follow. (118)

The ancient tale delineates the modern narrative, designs cross-cultural
encounters and explores the transcultural movements between China
and Australia, bridging the gap that so often prevails in Sino-Australian
relations. By entering the ancient tale, Shen Fuling and Ruth Garrett both
penetrate the space of a mythical personal story and also delve into the
historic account of imperial China. Such a journey through the spaces
of time and reality is counterbalanced with the modern-day characters'
perception of 20th and 21st century Chinese culture and politics so that
the old tale (visible in the text through the typographic use of italics)
nation, the "flowerpot" being a receptacle and an actor in the process
of the relation between China and Australia, "a sort of consciousness of
consciousness," turning each individual "into a disconcerted actor in the
poetics of relation" (Glissant 27).

In his address on art in Chinatown, Sydney, Jose metaphorically
highlights the negation of the Asian presence in Australia as early as
the British settlement of the country in the 18th century and calls for a
reconfiguration of national history. In his novel *The Red Thread* (2000)
he focuses on the relations between China and Australia and through the
dynamic of intercultural relations explores Asian-Australian encounters.
The love-story between Shen Fuling, a Chinese art dealer educated in
the US, and Ruth Garrett, an Anglo-Australian artist, in the present is
intertwined with the ancient tale of two lovers, Shen Fu, a young Chinese
poet and painter, and Yün, his beloved wife, in eighteenth century imperial
China. The story not only connects Asia with Australia but also overlays
Chinese concepts of space onto Western ones in a process of creation of
new transcultural forms within the contact zone of encounters between
the past and the present:

> His (old Weng) parting advice to the young man was that the book
> might be medicine too. In that original narrative was a trace they
> must follow. Since it was working its way through their lives, they
> had no choice. It was deep, the old man said. He could see it clearly
> himself. It was certain, however, that they must find their way to
> the true end of the story. This was the path they must follow. (118)

The ancient tale delineates the modern narrative, designs cross-cultural
encounters and explores the transcultural movements between China
and Australia, bridging the gap that so often prevails in Sino-Australian
relations. By entering the ancient tale, Shen Fuling and Ruth Garrett both
penetrate the space of a mythical personal story and also delve into the
historic account of imperial China. Such a journey through the spaces
of time and reality is counterbalanced with the modern-day characters'
perception of 20th and 21st century Chinese culture and politics so that
the old tale (visible in the text through the typographic use of italics)
operates as a subverting agent to the present: "One should try to show the small in the big, and the big in the small, and provide for the real in the unreal and for the unreal in the real. One reveals and conceals alternately, making it sometimes apparent and sometimes hidden" (53).

The ancient tale and more importantly the last two missing chap-
ters, which the characters strive to imagine and rewrite, all participate
in designing an alter space within Shen Fuling's family home, an old but
treasured place that attests to the importance of the past, in a communist
country which is turning towards global markets and capitalism. The
journey through time and place can thus only and symbolically take place
first within the space of Shen's old family home, then through the location
and transitory nature of an inn, and then as the story of Ruth and Shen
is about to end, in the old house again so that beginnings are endings
and the two tales interact and become one. The old family-home, like all
the other old houses in the city, is about to be seized and demolished
for urban-planning and housing-development. The house embodies not
only the family history, having been built by Shen's grandfather, but also
the possibility for the ancient tale to surface and interact in a rhizomatic
fashion with the story of Shen and Ruth. The house is depicted as being a
"mock-Tudor pile of red-bricks, half-timbering and fancy stonework" (36),
standing in fact as a mimicry of the medieval English-style homestead
and as the natural space where the ancient tale can resurface and act
upon the present. It is only within the space of home that the tale can
have an effect on the characters and that Shen and Ruth can enter the
ancient tale as their own reality. As the house is about to be demolished,
time has symbolically come for Ruth to meet her tragic death:

The old stairs creaked under his feet as he climbed. He had looked
everywhere else for Ruthand Han before he remembered how Yun's
spirit had returned to the room where she and Shen Fu had found
bliss, hiding in the flare of candles. [...] There was Ruth lying under
the quilt. Through the dusty window and the wooden lattice the dusk
light was cast like a glowing cage. The room was ghostly, with still a
powdery coating over everything except the polished wood of the
bed and his old camphor trunk.
operates as a subverting agent to the present: "One should try to show the small in the big, and the big in the small, and provide for the real in the unreal and for the unreal in the real. One reveals and conceals alternately, making it sometimes apparent and sometimes hidden" (53).

The ancient tale and more importantly the last two missing chap-
ters, which the characters strive to imagine and rewrite, all participate
in designing an alter space within Shen Fuling's family home, an old but
treasured place that attests to the importance of the past, in a communist
country which is turning towards global markets and capitalism. The
journey through time and place can thus only and symbolically take place
first within the space of Shen's old family home, then through the location
and transitory nature of an inn, and then as the story of Ruth and Shen
is about to end, in the old house again so that beginnings are endings
and the two tales interact and become one. The old family-home, like all
the other old houses in the city, is about to be seized and demolished
for urban-planning and housing-development. The house embodies not
only the family history, having been built by Shen's grandfather, but also
the possibility for the ancient tale to surface and interact in a rhizomatic
fashion with the story of Shen and Ruth. The house is depicted as being a
"mock-Tudor pile of red-bricks, half-timbering and fancy stonework" (36),
standing in fact as a mimicry of the medieval English-style homestead
and as the natural space where the ancient tale can resurface and act
upon the present. It is only within the space of home that the tale can
have an effect on the characters and that Shen and Ruth can enter the
ancient tale as their own reality. As the house is about to be demolished,
time has symbolically come for Ruth to meet her tragic death:

The old stairs creaked under his feet as he climbed. He had looked
everywhere else for Ruthand Han before he remembered how Yun's
spirit had returned to the room where she and Shen Fu had found
bliss, hiding in the flare of candles. [...] There was Ruth lying under
the quilt. Through the dusty window and the wooden lattice the dusk
light was cast like a glowing cage. The room was ghostly, with still a
powdery coating over everything except the polished wood of the
bed and his old camphor trunk.
'Han?' she murmured.

She was alone and there was no sign of how she had got there or
what state she was in. He hesitated to stir her.

'No,' he said. 'It's Shen.'

'Shen,' she repeated with pleasure in her voice. [...] 'I escaped,' she said. 'I wanted to come here. I'm waiting for the building to collapse around me.' She smiled, her face full of light and movement, her skin lucent. A film had been removed from her eyes, a heavy inert layer.

'I don't need the operation, Shen.' (158-159)

The sense of the gothic, which is encompassed through the setting and
the elements such as the flickering light of the candles or the powdery
dust, emphasizes the interaction of the ancient tale with the modern-day
story, so that home surfaces as a space where the real characters can
enter and experience the ancient tale, wishing to rewrite what is missing
(i.e. the last and lost two chapters) and thus escape from reality. The
space of the family-home combines fiction and reality but also serves
as a prop to address current issues at a time when China is expanding
as a major economic player. Shen Fuling, an art dealer, who is nostalgic
about the past, is critical of the economic policy of the communist regime
especially as far as the expropriation of land and housing. The loss of
the family house is both interpreted as a dismissal of the past and as a
step into the future:

'This house is as good as gone. It's history.'

'Your father's house,' Shen observed quietly.

'Don't remind me,' his father chided. 'That landlord father of mine
brought me enough trouble with his grand dream of a house that no
one could ignore. Yes, it's all history now.' (161)

The destruction of the house and family home interestingly takes place
during Shen's integration in the poetic space of the ancient tale so that
a fragment of the past is revived while the present, marked by economic
expansion and urban planning, is nothing but an artificial construct.
Shanghai surfaces as a dual place, being both an insecure home for
'Han?' she murmured.

She was alone and there was no sign of how she had got there or
what state she was in. He hesitated to stir her.

'No,' he said. 'It's Shen.'

'Shen,' she repeated with pleasure in her voice. [...] 'I escaped,' she said. 'I wanted to come here. I'm waiting for the building to collapse around me.' She smiled, her face full of light and movement, her skin lucent. A film had been removed from her eyes, a heavy inert layer.

'I don't need the operation, Shen.' (158-159)

The sense of the gothic, which is encompassed through the setting and
the elements such as the flickering light of the candles or the powdery
dust, emphasizes the interaction of the ancient tale with the modern-day
story, so that home surfaces as a space where the real characters can
enter and experience the ancient tale, wishing to rewrite what is missing
(i.e. the last and lost two chapters) and thus escape from reality. The
space of the family-home combines fiction and reality but also serves
as a prop to address current issues at a time when China is expanding
as a major economic player. Shen Fuling, an art dealer, who is nostalgic
about the past, is critical of the economic policy of the communist regime
especially as far as the expropriation of land and housing. The loss of
the family house is both interpreted as a dismissal of the past and as a
step into the future:

'This house is as good as gone. It's history.'

'Your father's house,' Shen observed quietly.

'Don't remind me,' his father chided. 'That landlord father of mine
brought me enough trouble with his grand dream of a house that no
one could ignore. Yes, it's all history now.' (161)

The destruction of the house and family home interestingly takes place
during Shen's integration in the poetic space of the ancient tale so that
a fragment of the past is revived while the present, marked by economic
expansion and urban planning, is nothing but an artificial construct.
Shanghai surfaces as a dual place, being both an insecure home for
the commoners and a wonderful (economic) opportunity for money-makers.

Shen Fuling's home-city, like the old family home, embodies the transitory nature of characters as much as their sense of otherness: Shen Fuling being depicted as the westernized Chinese other, being on the margins of Chinese society, and Ruth being the Australian artist abroad, immersed in Chinese culture and at odds with her own home-country. In the opening pages of the novel, Shen Fuling reflects on his life, both as a graduate from Fudan University, Shanghai, or as an exchange student at Georgetown University. He expresses his assimilation into American culture as much as he is aware that his Chinese heritage has not yet been fully embraced: "Thus I came to realize that my own culture lay hidden deep within me and it would require work on my part to gain access to it" (10). Such a statement alludes not only to the forthcoming events and immersion in the ancient tale as a means to "gain access" to his own culture, but also as a means to relate and assume his hybrid self: being both westernized and holding on to his oriental culture.

Since the 20th century, the politics of home and belonging through displacement and the incorporation of cultural others within multicultural and post-colonial Australia have become critical issues, subverting existing discourses and manifestations of otherness along with diasporic encounters. For diasporic individuals, migrant others, the issue of "home" for instance tends to be either embedded in memories, personal histories, and also seems to rest on the idea of the lost and imagined community. Benedict Anderson's study of nationalisms, *Imagined Communities* (1983), asserts that one feature of the nation is that the nation is "'limited' because even the largest of [nations], encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations" (7). That very limitation and elasticity of national space, which individuals understand as "home," surfaces in Nam Le's short story collection, *The Boat* (2008). Nam Le's stories tend to focus on diasporic forms of nostalgia for the lost home, longing and memory; forms which often surface through the identification and un-relatedness of characters with Australia and Asia so that Asian-Australian encounters subvert the Anglo-centric configurations of home from an alter space, which is not
the commoners and a wonderful (economic) opportunity for money-makers.

Shen Fuling's home-city, like the old family home, embodies the transitory nature of characters as much as their sense of otherness: Shen Fuling being depicted as the westernized Chinese other, being on the margins of Chinese society, and Ruth being the Australian artist abroad, immersed in Chinese culture and at odds with her own home-country. In the opening pages of the novel, Shen Fuling reflects on his life, both as a graduate from Fudan University, Shanghai, or as an exchange student at Georgetown University. He expresses his assimilation into American culture as much as he is aware that his Chinese heritage has not yet been fully embraced: "Thus I came to realize that my own culture lay hidden deep within me and it would require work on my part to gain access to it" (10). Such a statement alludes not only to the forthcoming events and immersion in the ancient tale as a means to "gain access" to his own culture, but also as a means to relate and assume his hybrid self: being both westernized and holding on to his oriental culture.

Since the 20th century, the politics of home and belonging through displacement and the incorporation of cultural others within multicultural and post-colonial Australia have become critical issues, subverting existing discourses and manifestations of otherness along with diasporic encounters. For diasporic individuals, migrant others, the issue of "home" for instance tends to be either embedded in memories, personal histories, and also seems to rest on the idea of the lost and imagined community. Benedict Anderson's study of nationalisms, *Imagined Communities* (1983), asserts that one feature of the nation is that the nation is "'limited' because even the largest of [nations], encompassing perhaps a billion living human beings, has finite, if elastic boundaries, beyond which lie other nations" (7). That very limitation and elasticity of national space, which individuals understand as "home," surfaces in Nam Le's short story collection, *The Boat* (2008). Nam Le's stories tend to focus on diasporic forms of nostalgia for the lost home, longing and memory; forms which often surface through the identification and un-relatedness of characters with Australia and Asia so that Asian-Australian encounters subvert the Anglo-centric configurations of home from an alter space, which is not
necessarily Asia or Australia. The characters' personal histories of disturbances and trauma tend to be looked upon through a global perspective so that the meaning of "home" relies on fragmentation, instabilities and displacements. Cultural alienation, migrancy, dual citizenship and identity are approached and looked upon from the perspective of former colonized places, including the Americas. Displaced subjects, in search of meaning and belonging to place, are caught in a reality that surfaces as a transitory space and form that are constantly subverted. The stories seem in fact to bring to mind Ahmed Gamal's assertion that "home" is redefined as a social reality that is structured by discourses and extends to "abroad"—a space that is situated in the liminal and borderline existence of the cultural Other. The first story of the collection, titled "Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice" and which openly refers to William Faulkner's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, examines the relationship between the main narrator, called Nam, who is currently living in the US, and his Vietnamese father visiting from his then home-country, Australia. Family issues and cultural identities surface through the characters' respective geo-physical isolation and tangible exclusion from their current environment:

> HERE IS WHAT I BELIEVE: WE forgive any sacrifice by our parents, so long as it is in our name. To my father there was no other name-only mine, and he had named me after the homeland he had given up. ... At sixteen I left home. There was a girl, and crystal meth, and the possibility of greater loss than I had imagined possible. She embodied everything prohibited by my father and plainly worthwhile. Of course he was right about her: she taught me hurt-but promise too. ... When my father found out my mother was supporting me, he gave her an ultimatum. She moved into a family friend's textile factory and learned to use an overlock machine and continued sending me money. (21)

The first-person narrator is reminiscing about his family home and his personal history, attempting to write the "ethnic story" that is expected of him. In so doing, the character identified as "Nam" is confronted not only to the sacrifice that his parents may have made for him but also
necessarily Asia or Australia. The characters' personal histories of disturbances and trauma tend to be looked upon through a global perspective so that the meaning of "home" relies on fragmentation, instabilities and displacements. Cultural alienation, migrancy, dual citizenship and identity are approached and looked upon from the perspective of former colonized places, including the Americas. Displaced subjects, in search of meaning and belonging to place, are caught in a reality that surfaces as a transitory space and form that are constantly subverted. The stories seem in fact to bring to mind Ahmed Gamal's assertion that "home" is redefined as a social reality that is structured by discourses and extends to "abroad"—a space that is situated in the liminal and borderline existence of the cultural Other. The first story of the collection, titled "Love and Honour and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice" and which openly refers to William Faulkner's acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, examines the relationship between the main narrator, called Nam, who is currently living in the US, and his Vietnamese father visiting from his then home-country, Australia. Family issues and cultural identities surface through the characters' respective geo-physical isolation and tangible exclusion from their current environment:

> HERE IS WHAT I BELIEVE: WE forgive any sacrifice by our parents, so long as it is in our name. To my father there was no other name-only mine, and he had named me after the homeland he had given up. ... At sixteen I left home. There was a girl, and crystal meth, and the possibility of greater loss than I had imagined possible. She embodied everything prohibited by my father and plainly worthwhile. Of course he was right about her: she taught me hurt-but promise too. ... When my father found out my mother was supporting me, he gave her an ultimatum. She moved into a family friend's textile factory and learned to use an overlock machine and continued sending me money. (21)

The first-person narrator is reminiscing about his family home and his personal history, attempting to write the "ethnic story" that is expected of him. In so doing, the character identified as "Nam" is confronted not only to the sacrifice that his parents may have made for him but also
to the consequences of such sacrifices on the stability of home and
parenthood. The character's thoughts and association with his parents'
native country both operate around memories and landscape associations
that are trans-localised in the process of migration and displacement.
The story tackles the issue of ethnic location as the only means for the
first-person narrator, Nam, to assert himself and achieve recognition.
Home is thus strictly circumscribed to otherness and the liminal space,
to such an extent that all the main characters tend to be caught in the
old colonial binary of "Them and Us." N. Le's short-story collection seems
to dismiss any idea of "origin," "home" or "nation" laying stress on the
conditions of individuals who are desperate to give meaning to their shabby
reality. Through their universal themes and locations in an international
environment, the stories clearly operate beyond the "ethnic" labelling
that may be laid on non-Anglo Australian authors and may initiate a
re-reading of Australian literature from outside a dominant culture, from
a position that does not lie in the shadow of Britain or Europe but owes
more to cosmopolitanism, so that "home" is the world.

The use of home as a signifier for either belonging, identity, inclusion or exclusion surfaces through the issue of migration so that post-colonial and multicultural Australia is being both subverted and reconfigured. Alice Pung's autobiographic narratives examine the issue of ethnicity and migration from an inside perspective, from the family-home in Australia, to interrogate the inclusion of Asian migration within the history of the multicultural nation, cultural gaps between different generations of the same family, the space of domesticity and home. Home is a transcultural space so that various rooms tend to metaphorize the characters' own subjectivity and positioning within Australia. Thus, in her memoir, *Unpolished Gem*, Pung confronts the inside (home) with the outside world (Australia) to examine the way in which some individuals may or may not assimilate in a home, which is yet a transitory location:

> You cannot tell that this is a Chinese house. No hexagonal I Ching
> mirror on the front door, no words of warning, no clipped hedge and
> double happiness signs anywhere, unless you count the name of our
> street. No neat little cumquat trees at the front for luck.
to the consequences of such sacrifices on the stability of home and
parenthood. The character's thoughts and association with his parents'
native country both operate around memories and landscape associations
that are trans-localised in the process of migration and displacement.
The story tackles the issue of ethnic location as the only means for the
first-person narrator, Nam, to assert himself and achieve recognition.
Home is thus strictly circumscribed to otherness and the liminal space,
to such an extent that all the main characters tend to be caught in the
old colonial binary of "Them and Us." N. Le's short-story collection seems
to dismiss any idea of "origin," "home" or "nation" laying stress on the
conditions of individuals who are desperate to give meaning to their shabby
reality. Through their universal themes and locations in an international
environment, the stories clearly operate beyond the "ethnic" labelling
that may be laid on non-Anglo Australian authors and may initiate a
re-reading of Australian literature from outside a dominant culture, from
a position that does not lie in the shadow of Britain or Europe but owes
more to cosmopolitanism, so that "home" is the world.

The use of home as a signifier for either belonging, identity, inclusion or exclusion surfaces through the issue of migration so that post-colonial and multicultural Australia is being both subverted and reconfigured. Alice Pung's autobiographic narratives examine the issue of ethnicity and migration from an inside perspective, from the family-home in Australia, to interrogate the inclusion of Asian migration within the history of the multicultural nation, cultural gaps between different generations of the same family, the space of domesticity and home. Home is a transcultural space so that various rooms tend to metaphorize the characters' own subjectivity and positioning within Australia. Thus, in her memoir, *Unpolished Gem*, Pung confronts the inside (home) with the outside world (Australia) to examine the way in which some individuals may or may not assimilate in a home, which is yet a transitory location:

> You cannot tell that this is a Chinese house. No hexagonal I Ching
> mirror on the front door, no words of warning, no clipped hedge and
> double happiness signs anywhere, unless you count the name of our
> street. No neat little cumquat trees at the front for luck.
We are trying to assimilate, to not stand out from the neighbours, to not bring shame to our whole race by carrying over certain habits from the old country, such as growing chickens in the backyard or keeping goats as pets. The plants we plant in the backyard are functional plants, herbs like hot Thai mint, basil, shallots and lemongrass, and we have geraniums and oleanders in the front yard.

In fact, if you watch from the outside, you will see the crinkle-faced Asian grandmother watering the bird-of-paradise flowers with the hose. Through the back window of the house you will see the mother washing the dishes in the kitchen, and in the front yard you can watch the two children with half-coconut-shell haircuts poking holes in the dirt and trying to plant black custard-apple seeds, and everything seems so true-blue suburban that you would never suspect that the inside of the house is crowded with such a collection of curiosities that make us smile, make my father clap his hands in delight as he peers up at the smiling faces of Ordinary Australians cut up from the Target brochures and strung up in sticky-taped chains in every room. (20)

The new family home that the Pungs have created in the host-country, after fleeing China, encompasses the parents' desire to become other, that is Australian subjects, while retaining some of their cultural heritage, so subtly metaphorized through the figure of the grandmother and the way in which the inside of the house and the outside tend to operate through a dualistic framing: the house not being a home for Alice's grandmother and not quite home to Alice's mother. The depiction and perception of home is closer to Massey's ontology of place as a process in individual life, as "articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings" (66). Home is both the expression of enrooting within a new geographic, social, cultural and political space and it is also a substitute to the home left in the home-country, in China. This complex perception of home encompasses the spatial and temporal restructuring of home as the everyday suburban location and it also foreshadows the ambivalence of a multiple spatiality. In the above passage, the perception of home is viewed from the outside perspective which tends to focus on the Asian
We are trying to assimilate, to not stand out from the neighbours, to not bring shame to our whole race by carrying over certain habits from the old country, such as growing chickens in the backyard or keeping goats as pets. The plants we plant in the backyard are functional plants, herbs like hot Thai mint, basil, shallots and lemongrass, and we have geraniums and oleanders in the front yard.

In fact, if you watch from the outside, you will see the crinkle-faced Asian grandmother watering the bird-of-paradise flowers with the hose. Through the back window of the house you will see the mother washing the dishes in the kitchen, and in the front yard you can watch the two children with half-coconut-shell haircuts poking holes in the dirt and trying to plant black custard-apple seeds, and everything seems so true-blue suburban that you would never suspect that the inside of the house is crowded with such a collection of curiosities that make us smile, make my father clap his hands in delight as he peers up at the smiling faces of Ordinary Australians cut up from the Target brochures and strung up in sticky-taped chains in every room. (20)

The new family home that the Pungs have created in the host-country, after fleeing China, encompasses the parents' desire to become other, that is Australian subjects, while retaining some of their cultural heritage, so subtly metaphorized through the figure of the grandmother and the way in which the inside of the house and the outside tend to operate through a dualistic framing: the house not being a home for Alice's grandmother and not quite home to Alice's mother. The depiction and perception of home is closer to Massey's ontology of place as a process in individual life, as "articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings" (66). Home is both the expression of enrooting within a new geographic, social, cultural and political space and it is also a substitute to the home left in the home-country, in China. This complex perception of home encompasses the spatial and temporal restructuring of home as the everyday suburban location and it also foreshadows the ambivalence of a multiple spatiality. In the above passage, the perception of home is viewed from the outside perspective which tends to focus on the Asian
otherness of the grandmother in opposition to the inner perspective, which
shifts towards the integration of the mother in the ideal of the Australian
suburban life, so that the space of home surfaces as a microcosm within
a macrocosm. Alice even recalls at some later stage in her life that the
whole family's house was "partitioned" (279). The idea of habitus, as Pierre
Bourdieu defines it, is here relevant to the ethnographic representation
of home, which tends to articulate upon relations of power between
the older generation embodied by the grandmother and the younger
generation embodied either by Alice's mother or Alice herself. Thus,
feelings of inclusion and exclusion are manifested through the aesthetics
of home, either in the architecture and/or design or in the way the various
characters tend to inhabit their new home—a "dream home, in a location
untainted by bad dreams and ominous paternal warnings" (127) that the
father builds, and which becomes the habitus and connecting space
between the material and social dimensions (the status that the father
has gained as a business-owner) and the migrant body. Thus, the dream
and conception of home both tend to emerge from the interrelatedness
of the past and the present, both envisaged as distinctive but connected
fields of the characters' social world: "Since there was no going back
now, there was only one way for our little nuclear family to go and that
was forwards. Forwards to the Great Australian Dream" (127).

In her memoir, Alice Pung examines her relationship with her mother
and grandmother, with a certain amount of wit and clarity, expressing
her own desire to be part of the multicultural nation, and it is thus
symbolically by moving out and settling down in her own home, when
entering university, that Alice becomes aware that she has gone through a
process of assimilation, being part of the multicultural nation. Yet, despite
her living in a new place of her own, Alice is nonetheless compelled to
visit her parents and then to re-integrate the family-home, never being
entirely able to escape from it, just like her parents are never able to
escape from their personal history.

In the account of her family's personal story and observation of
the processes at work in the experience of migration and incorporation
in the Australian narrative of the multicultural nation, Pung joins the
line of authors whose approach to home interrogates the construction
otherness of the grandmother in opposition to the inner perspective, which
shifts towards the integration of the mother in the ideal of the Australian
suburban life, so that the space of home surfaces as a microcosm within
a macrocosm. Alice even recalls at some later stage in her life that the
whole family's house was "partitioned" (279). The idea of habitus, as Pierre
Bourdieu defines it, is here relevant to the ethnographic representation
of home, which tends to articulate upon relations of power between
the older generation embodied by the grandmother and the younger
generation embodied either by Alice's mother or Alice herself. Thus,
feelings of inclusion and exclusion are manifested through the aesthetics
of home, either in the architecture and/or design or in the way the various
characters tend to inhabit their new home—a "dream home, in a location
untainted by bad dreams and ominous paternal warnings" (127) that the
father builds, and which becomes the habitus and connecting space
between the material and social dimensions (the status that the father
has gained as a business-owner) and the migrant body. Thus, the dream
and conception of home both tend to emerge from the interrelatedness
of the past and the present, both envisaged as distinctive but connected
fields of the characters' social world: "Since there was no going back
now, there was only one way for our little nuclear family to go and that
was forwards. Forwards to the Great Australian Dream" (127).

In her memoir, Alice Pung examines her relationship with her mother
and grandmother, with a certain amount of wit and clarity, expressing
her own desire to be part of the multicultural nation, and it is thus
symbolically by moving out and settling down in her own home, when
entering university, that Alice becomes aware that she has gone through a
process of assimilation, being part of the multicultural nation. Yet, despite
her living in a new place of her own, Alice is nonetheless compelled to
visit her parents and then to re-integrate the family-home, never being
entirely able to escape from it, just like her parents are never able to
escape from their personal history.

In the account of her family's personal story and observation of
the processes at work in the experience of migration and incorporation
in the Australian narrative of the multicultural nation, Pung joins the
line of authors whose approach to home interrogates the construction
of Australia as a nation, as an imagined community in the South Pacific. Home surfaces as the space of the unhomely, which to borrow from Bhabha's own words "captures something of the estranging sense of the relocation of the home and the world in an unhallowed place" (141).

## Works cited

ANDERSON, Benedict. *Imagined Communities*. 1983. London, Verson, 2006.

ASHCROFT, Bill. *Postcolonial Transformations*. London, Routledge, 2001.

BACHELARD, Gaston. *The Poetics of Space*. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston, Beacon Press, 1964.

BENNETT, Bruce. *Homing In*. Perth, Network, 2006.

BHABHA, Homi. K. "The World and the Home." *Third World and Post-Colonial Issues*. Durham, Duke UP, 1992, pp. 141-153.

BOURDIEU, Pierre. *Le Sens pratique*. Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1980.

BOURRIAUD, Nicolas. *Radicant*. New York, Lukas & Sternberg, 2009.

BURTON Sir, Richard F., trans. *The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights*. 1932. New York, Modern Library, 2004.

CASEY, Edward S. *Getting Back into Place*. Bloomington, Indiana PU, 2009.

GAMAGE, Bill. *The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia*. Crows Nest, Allen & Unwin, 2011.

GAMAL, Ahmed. "The Global and the Postcolonial in Post-migratory Literature." *Journal of Postcolonial Writing*, vol. 49, n° 5, 2013, pp. 596-608.

GELDER, Ken and Jane M. JACOBS. *Uncanny Australia*. Melbourne UP, 1994.

GEMMELL, Nikki. *Cleave*. Sydney, Random House, 1998.

GILROY, Paul. *After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? Abingdon-on-Thames, Routledge, 2004*.

GLISSANT, Edouard. *Poetics of Relation*. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor, U of Michigan P, 1997.

GREER, Germaine. "White Fella Jump Up: The Shortest Way to Nationhood." *Quarterly Essays*, issue 11, August 2003.

GREGORY, John Walter. *The Dead Heart of Australia. A Journey around Lake Eyre in the Summer of 1901-1902, with some Account of the Lake Eyre Basin and the Flowing Wells of Central Australia*. London, John Murray, 1906.
of Australia as a nation, as an imagined community in the South Pacific.
Home surfaces as the space of the unhomely, which to borrow from
Bhabha's own words "captures something of the estranging sense of
the relocation of the home and the world in an unhallowed place" (141).

Works cited

ANDERSON, Benedict. *Imagined Communities*. 1983. London, Verson, 2006.

ASHCROFT, Bill. *Postcolonial Transformations*. London, Routledge, 2001.

BACHELARD, Gaston. *The Poetics of Space*. Trans. Maria Jolas. Boston, Beacon Press, 1964.

BENNETT, Bruce. *Homing In*. Perth, Network, 2006.

BHABHA, Homi. K. "The World and the Home." *Third World and Post-Colonial Issues*. Durham, Duke UP, 1992, pp. 141-153.

BOURDIEU, Pierre. *Le Sens pratique*. Paris, Editions de Minuit, 1980.

BOURRIAUD, Nicolas. *Radicant*. New York, Lukas & Sternberg, 2009.

BURTON Sir, Richard F., trans. *The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights*. 1932. New York, Modern Library, 2004.

CASEY, Edward S. *Getting Back into Place*. Bloomington, Indiana PU, 2009.

GAMAGE, Bill. *The Biggest Estate on Earth: How Aborigines Made Australia*. Crows Nest, Allen & Unwin, 2011.

GAMAL, Ahmed. "The Global and the Postcolonial in Post-migratory Literature." *Journal of Postcolonial Writing*, vol. 49, n° 5, 2013, pp. 596-608.

GELDER, Ken and Jane M. JACOBS. *Uncanny Australia*. Melbourne UP, 1994.

GEMMELL, Nikki. *Cleave*. Sydney, Random House, 1998.

GILROY, Paul. *After Empire: Melancholia or Convivial Culture? Abingdon-on-Thames, Routledge, 2004.*

GLISSANT, Edouard. *Poetics of Relation*. Trans. Betsy Wing. Ann Arbor, U of Michigan P, 1997.

GREER, Germaine. "White Fella Jump Up: The Shortest Way to Nationhood." *Quarterly Essays*, issue 11, August 2003.

GREGORY, John Walter. *The Dead Heart of Australia. A Journey around Lake Eyre in the Summer of 1901-1902, with some Account of the Lake Eyre Basin and the Flowing Wells of Central Australia*. London, John Murray, 1906.
HAGE, Ghassan. "Existential Territories: The Lenticular Condition." 1 April 2019. https://www.rca.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/existential-territories-lenticular-condition/. Accessed 12 January 2020.

—. "HOMInG Interview with Professor Ghassan Hage." Sara Bonfanti, University of Trento. g-hage_homing-interview.pdf, 12 September 2018. Accessed 1 September 2021.

JOSE, Nicholas. *The Red Thread*. San Francisco, Chronicles, 2000.

—. "What is a Chinese Garden?" 21 October 2011. http://www.4a.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Nicholas-Jose-New-Century-GardenFINAL.pdf. Accessed 1 September 2021.

LE, Nam. *The Boat*. 2008. Camberwell, Penguin, 2009.

MASSEY, Doreen. "Power-geometry and a progressive sense of place." *Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change*. Ed. Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, and Lisa Tickner. London and New York, Routledge, 1993.

NIEKERK, M. "Winton Uncovers the Bones." *Canberra Times*, 6 April 1991, p. 17.

PASCOE, Bruce. *Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?* Broome, Magabala, 2015.

PUNG, Alice. *Unpolished Gem*. Melbourne, Black Inc., 2006.

—. *Growing up Asian in Australia*. Melbourne, Black Inc., 2008.

—. "Interview on *Growing up Asian in Australia*." Blackinbooks.com., 2008.

ROSE, D.B. *Nourishing Terrains*. Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness. Canberra, Australian Heritage Commission, 1997.

SALLIS HORNUNG, Eva. *Hiam*. Crows Nest, Allen & Unwin, 1998.

—. *The City of Sealions*. Crows Nest, Allen & Unwin, 2002.

—. "Australian Dream, Australian Nightmare: Some Thoughts on Multiculturalism and Racism." 31 March 2007. https://www.safecom.org.au/eva-sallis-mch.htm. Accessed 1 September 2021.

WINTON, Tim. *Cloudstreet*. Ringwood, Penguin, 1991.
HAGE, Ghassan. "Existential Territories: The Lenticular Condition." 1 April 2019. https://www.rca.ac.uk/news-and-events/events/existential-territories-lenticular-condition/. Accessed 12 January 2020.

—. "HOMInG Interview with Professor Ghassan Hage." Sara Bonfanti, University of Trento. g-hage_homing-interview.pdf, 12 September 2018. Accessed 1 September 2021.

JOSE, Nicholas. *The Red Thread*. San Francisco, Chronicles, 2000.

—. "What is a Chinese Garden?" 21 October 2011. http://www.4a.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/Nicholas-Jose-New-Century-GardenFINAL.pdf. Accessed 1 September 2021.

LE, Nam. *The Boat*. 2008. Camberwell, Penguin, 2009.

MASSEY, Doreen. "Power-geometry and a progressive sense of place." *Mapping the Futures: Local Cultures, Global Change*. Ed. Jon Bird, Barry Curtis, Tim Putnam, and Lisa Tickner. London and New York, Routledge, 1993.

NIEKERK, M. "Winton Uncovers the Bones." *Canberra Times*, 6 April 1991, p. 17.

PASCOE, Bruce. *Dark Emu: Black Seeds: Agriculture or Accident?* Broome, Magabala, 2015.

PUNG, Alice. *Unpolished Gem*. Melbourne, Black Inc., 2006.

—. *Growing up Asian in Australia*. Melbourne, Black Inc., 2008.

—. "Interview on *Growing up Asian in Australia*." Blackinbooks.com., 2008.

ROSE, D.B. *Nourishing Terrains*. Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness. Canberra, Australian Heritage Commission, 1997.

SALLIS HORNUNG, Eva. *Hiam*. Crows Nest, Allen & Unwin, 1998.

—. *The City of Sealions*. Crows Nest, Allen & Unwin, 2002.

—. "Australian Dream, Australian Nightmare: Some Thoughts on Multiculturalism and Racism." 31 March 2007. https://www.safecom.org.au/eva-sallis-mch.htm. Accessed 1 September 2021.

WINTON, Tim. *Cloudstreet*. Ringwood, Penguin, 1991.
<figure><img src="image_17.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_17.png" /></figure>
Chapter
10

Cosmopolitan Homes
or Haunted Homes?
Unsweetened Stories
of Home in Transnational
Culinary Memoirs

Corinne Bigot
Chapter
10

Cosmopolitan Homes
or Haunted Homes?
Unsweetened Stories
of Home in Transnational
Culinary Memoirs

Corinne Bigot
<figure><img src="image_18.png" /></figure>
<figure><img src="image_18.png" /></figure>
Chapter
10

The title of Joyce Zonana's culinary memoir, *Dreams Homes: From Cairo to Katrina: An Exile's Journey* (2008) is a reminder of how fragile the concept of home is for diasporans. While the cities evoke the lost, ancestral, homeland and the home she made for herself in New Orleans, before she moved back to Brooklyn, "An exile's journey" evokes a life-long journey in search of home, which characterizes many diasporic, or transnational,<fnref n="117" /> culinary memoirs. Most importantly, "Dream homes" reminds us that home is first and foremost a discourse. It is a discourse of locality—evoking a place with which we maintain intimate emotional connections even though we are no longer there, and thus a spiritual location—akin to Rushdie's "Imaginary Homelands" (1992).

Home is a prevalent and useful trope in diasporic fiction. Avtar Brah posits that the concept of diaspora embodies a subtext of home (190). Similarly for Françoise Král, "The home marks the inscription of the diasporic self into the new land, but [...] also allows him to shelter his other half and keep the home country alive" (40). It is a core ingredient in diasporic/transnational culinary memoirs. Anita Mannur's work on "culinary fictions" shows how for immigrants "food has become a tool to articulate tensions that emerge through the chaffing of identity vectors of 'home'

<footnote n="117">¹¹⁷ Anita Mannur uses the word 'diasporic,' Sandra Gilbert, 'transnational,' and Paula Torreiro Pazo 'multiethnic' to refer to the same memoirs. Although the word "diasporic" works well with Avtar Brah's concepts of the diaspora space and homing desire, "Transnational," which evokes lives on and across borders, allows me to define the home the memoirs create as cosmopolitan.</footnote>
Chapter
10

The title of Joyce Zonana's culinary memoir, *Dreams Homes: From Cairo to Katrina: An Exile's Journey* (2008) is a reminder of how fragile the concept of home is for diasporans. While the cities evoke the lost, ancestral, homeland and the home she made for herself in New Orleans, before she moved back to Brooklyn, "An exile's journey" evokes a life-long journey in search of home, which characterizes many diasporic, or transnational,<fnref n="117" /> culinary memoirs. Most importantly, "Dream homes" reminds us that home is first and foremost a discourse. It is a discourse of locality—evoking a place with which we maintain intimate emotional connections even though we are no longer there, and thus a spiritual location—akin to Rushdie's "Imaginary Homelands" (1992).

Home is a prevalent and useful trope in diasporic fiction. Avtar Brah posits that the concept of diaspora embodies a subtext of home (190). Similarly for Françoise Král, "The home marks the inscription of the diasporic self into the new land, but [...] also allows him to shelter his other half and keep the home country alive" (40). It is a core ingredient in diasporic/transnational culinary memoirs. Anita Mannur's work on "culinary fictions" shows how for immigrants "food has become a tool to articulate tensions that emerge through the chaffing of identity vectors of 'home'

<footnote n="117">¹¹⁷ Anita Mannur uses the word 'diasporic,' Sandra Gilbert, 'transnational,' and Paula Torreiro Pazo 'multiethnic' to refer to the same memoirs. Although the word "diasporic" works well with Avtar Brah's concepts of the diaspora space and homing desire, "Transnational," which evokes lives on and across borders, allows me to define the home the memoirs create as cosmopolitan.</footnote>
and 'diaspora''' (185). Food can provide immigrants with a connection to their homeland, it can also represent their struggle to assimilate and, for third generations, symbolize a connection to their ethnic legacy. So it is no surprise that the culinary memoir has been popular among diasporans and hyphenated Americans since the late 1990s, as shown by Smith and Watson, Roy, Mannur, Gilbert and Torreiro Pazo.

As these memoirs focus on domestic scenes—mothers preparing dishes in the kitchen, families sharing meals—the reader is invited into the author's home and becomes privy to a home life that often confused the author. What kind of home, then, does the transnational culinary memoir invite the reader in? While culinary memoirs with recipes can serve idealized versions, or even fictions, of home—Colette Rossant's *Apricots on the Nile* (1999), which recalls the author's childhood in her father's family's home in Cairo, is a case in point—most authors dispute the notion that home is a stable concept as they analyze their complex relationships with home, family and identity—three interconnected concepts.

In this chapter, I analyze culinary memoirs published in the 2000s, from several cultural backgrounds and culinary legacies: Louise DeSalvo's *Crazy in the Kitchen* (2004), Diane Abu-Jaber's *The Language of Baklava* (2005), Linda Furiya's *Bento Box in the Heartland* (2006), Bich Nguyen's *Stealing Buddha's Dinner* (2007), Laura Schenone's *The Lost Ravioli Recipes of Hoboken* (2007) and Joyce Zonana's *Dream Homes* (2008). The authors revisit their childhood homes, analyzing the affects that made them see it as a safe haven, a prison, or a battle field. Homes are shown to be essentially hybrid spaces—neither “American American” homes nor bastions of ethnicity. Revisiting their childhood home and the ancestral homeland are often seen as stages in journey in search of home as the authors interrogate their “homing desire”—a term coined by Avtar Brah (180)—which both stresses and questions the need to feel at home. Most authors also discuss the home they want to create for their own family—a home that is connected to the past but also to the world. Ultimately, I will consider the possibility that the memoir itself is the only home that the author can claim for herself, a home where her ghosts, and her readers, are welcomed.