‘Did He Want to Mix and Mate with this Man?’: Mateship, Modernism and Homoerotic Primitivism
Abstract
Focuses on English writers in Australia, and what these journeys mean 'in relation to the contested term "Australian modernism"'. 'In particular, I argue that the cross-cultural discourse created by Englishmen mixing and mating with white Australian men inscribes mateship as a type of homoerotic primitivism that encourages and supports not only the articulation but also the obfuscation of same-sex desires between men. In the first part of this essay I unpack some of my key critical terms, such as modernism and homoerotic primitivism, before exploring some exemplary literary examples from the 1920s and early 1930s: D.H. Lawrence's Kangaroo (1923), E.L. Grant Watson's The Desert Horizon (1923), and William Hatfield's Sheepmates (1931). In addition, I also discuss David Maloufs Fly Away Peter (1982) as a late-modernist novel that highlights the political and aesthetic continuities between these earlier works and more recent fiction.'
Please sign in to access this article and the rest of our archive.
Published 1 May 2012 in Volume 27 No. 1. Subjects: Aboriginal land rights & native title, Colonialism & imperialism - Literary portrayal, Eroticism, Homosexuality, Mateship, Primitivism, David Malouf, D. H. Lawrence.
Cite as: Barlow, Damien. ‘‘Did He Want to Mix and Mate with this Man?’: Mateship, Modernism and Homoerotic Primitivism.’ Australian Literary Studies, vol. 27, no. 1, 2012, doi: 10.20314/als.817f70be95.