‘What Would Civilisation Be without a Gun?’ The Resistant Land in Sarah Campion’s Burdekin Trilogy

Abstract

Elizabeth Lawson's 'biographical-critical survey' published in ALS in 2004 was the most recent of several efforts to win for Sarah Campion's novels the attention that their literary distinction warrants. Due attention has been deferred, I suspect, by the wide-ranging iconoclasm of Campion's fiction, which has confirmed its place in the 'separate but repressed' traditions of women's writing? In this essay I hope to maintain the momentum generated by Lawson by discussing a feature central to Campion's 1940s Burdekin trilogy that has not been analysed in depth, namely her complex responses as a visiting European to the Australian land and bush. I intend to consider the ways in which these responses are relevant to the author's political thinking, and to her representations of men and women in relationship.