Chris Conti

‘The conflict between scientist and politician at the heart of Ibsen’s¬†An Enemy of the People is replete with allegorical suggestion. The play is, for this reason, easy to oversimplify as a tale of pristine scientific truth versus grubby government coverups. The conflict is better characterised according to competing reactions to a truth already out in the open. In the age of the endless news cycle, Anne-Louise Sarks observes in her Director‚Äôs Note, “the question is not so much will the truth come out ‚Äì as what will we do about the truth that is already out in the open and known?”‘

Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, which turns fifty this year, owes a share of its longevity to the modern folklore of vanished white women that has swirled around sites like Hanging Rock in Victoria’s Macedon Ranges since the nineteenth century. The tale’s enduring appeal and unsettling allure arises from a mist of fact and fiction, casting a magic unspoiled even by the kitsch tourist injunction at Hanging Rock Reserve to ‘Experience the Mystery.’

The Secret River is best read in terms other than those Grenville has framed for it. The historical novel in the realist mode will never escape the sort of criticism pointed at Grenville: departing from the historical record and projecting the present onto the past. The needs of plot, drama, character and so on demand such departures; for if the historian is tied to the archive, the novelist is bound by the audience. The novelist’s distortions of the historical are necessary not just for artistic purposes, however, as fidelity to the historical record was never the exclusive goal in the first place. Rather than read The Secret River as ‘true history’ by cordoning off its departures from the historical record, we might instead think of it as a critical appropriation of frontier mythology.

‘As the mythic space of the American imagination, the frontier has never closed. It remains the place where America conceives its identity, its values, and its destiny.’ Chris Conti on a new book about the enduring impact of frontier mythology on American fiction.