Tuesday ~ 16 June, 7:00 PM US Eastern / Wednesday ~ 17 June, 9:00 AM Australian Eastern
DESCRIPTION: This seminar examines Australia’s emergence as a writing society and the cultural and political stakes of literacy, authorship, and censorship from the nineteenth century through the early twentieth century.
Martyn Lyons challenges inflated claims about early Australian literacy by shifting attention away from reading competence toward writing practices. While only an estimated 50–60% of the settler population could read and write at a rudimentary level at the beginning of the nineteenth century, by its end the Australian colonies had developed exceptional epistolary competence, producing and receiving correspondence at a world-leading per capita rate. Drawing on autobiographical sources, Lyons explores how ordinary writers in the bush navigated material shortages, imperfect literacies, and the need for delegated writing. Emphasizing ordinary writings, such as letters and other non-literary texts produced by non-elites, Lyons reframes colonial Australia as a writing society shaped by the cultural practices of the uneducated and semi-literate majority.
Lisa Sarish examines how in the early twentieth century this expanding culture of writing encountered imperial control. Focusing on the 1930s, Sarish analyzes how British oversight of printing and distribution functioned as a form of risk management aimed at containing a distinct Australian literary voice and national identity. Using a microhistorical case study of ten articles published in West Australia in 1933, Sarish traces how Australian authors resisted parliamentary-imposed restrictions and delays caused by the needing to publish in England. These constraints limited Australian readers’ access to local writing and reinforced imperial narratives through imported texts.
These two papers illuminate the uneven development of literacy and authorship in Australia and show how non-elite writing- whether ordinary letters or censored literary texts- became a crucial to the development of literacy, and to the negotiation of identity and resistance within imperial communication systems.
PARTICIPANTS:
Martyn Lyons
Lisa Sarish