(issued November 1998)
PATRICIA CLANCY, JACQUES DE SAINT-FERJEUX, COLIN THORNTON-SMITH, Foreword
M. BLACKMAN, Transculturalism and Hybridity in the French-Australian Writer Paul Wenz
Maurice Blackman considers the transcultural position displayed by Wenz in ‘both the content and the écriture of his texts’. ‘His point of view is not that of a Frenchman specifically, but of someone who is simultaneously at home in the bush and yet “alien”’. He concludes that ‘Paul Wenz’s narratives do not only thematise aspects of the experience of transculturality, but the processes of their écriture also have the effect of infusing, one into the other, two hegemonic literary discourses, as well as the two dominant “imperial” languages’.
Keywords: Paul Wenz, Nanima, Forbes, Diary of a New Chum, L’Homme du soleil couchant, World War I
PAUL MAISTRE, Scènes de la vie australienne : “De mineur à ministre”, translated & introduced by C.B. THORNTON-SMITH
One of five short stories by Paul Maistre (Paul le Franc) published in the Madrid-based Nouvelle Revue Internationale between 1894 and 1897, De mineur à ministre offers a French view of events leading to the demise of ‘Marvellous Melbourne’. Maistre’s main character, Victorian politician Donald MacGillroe, is an amalgam of some politicians of the day whose excesses led to the 1890s financial crash.
Keywords: Paul Maistre, Paul le Franc, Victoria’s Land Boom, Marvellous Melbourne, Thomas Bent, James Munro, Duncan Gillies.