Republican challenge to Australian speculative fiction writers

The 2010 Second National Republican Short Story Competition opened on 1 May 2010 and closed on 31 August 2010. The winner will be announced on 6 November 2010.

The theme for the Second National Republican Short Story Competition is 'Life and Death in an Australian Republic'. Short stories will speculate on Australian republican futures.

The Second National Republican Short Story Competition continues the momentum built from the successful 2009 First National Republican Short Story Competition. 2009 was a milestone as it was 10 years on 6 November 2009 since the republican referendum was lost. To commemorate this event and to remind Australians what they still didn’t have the Australian Republican Movement ran the First National Republican Short Story Competition.

It seems strange there is no tradition of republican speculative fiction in Australia. In colonial times there were republican poets such as Charles Harpur writing in the 1840s and 1850s, and republican writers such as John Dunmore Lang and Daniel Deniehy in the 1850s and William Lane, Henry Lawson and John Norton in the 1880s and 1890s. But where have been the republican stories for the past century? There have certainly been many republican writers during this time but almost no examples where republican settings or arguments have been explored in Australian fiction. Republican arguments and explorations of the past and imaginations of the future are always written within the framework of constitutional debates.

Where do the people of Australia fit into this? Where are their myths and stories to tell and retell and remember about Australia’s emerging republican identity?

This Second National Republican Short Story Competition challenges Australia’s fiction writers to speculate on the possible futures of the Australian republic.

Speculative fiction writers deal with possibilities.

They speculate.

They make the future seem real.

However, we can’t achieve anything unless we imagine it first. Before every great invention and before every great journey is the idea. Without ideas and imagination, we are all trapped in the past.

So, the ARM (Q) would like to point the way forward through Australian stories with a republican backdrop. They don’t have to be political thrillers or constitutional whodunits as long as they are an exploration of our future, our republican future.

Tomorrow when the republic comes

M. Barnard Eldershaw was the pseudonym used by the twentieth century Australian literary collaborators Marjorie Barnard and Flora Eldershaw

Their final collaborative novel, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow, published in 1947 as Tomorrow and Tomorrow, is considered to be one of Australia's major early science fiction novels and was highly regarded by Australia's only Nobel Prize winner for literature, Patrick White. It is set in the 24th century and features Knarf (a novelist and historian whose name is an inversion of Frank Dalby Davison's first name).

The book is essentially a story-within-a-story, with much of it comprising an historical novel, written by the character Knarf, about "old" Australia from 1924-1946. This story is basically an alternative history of an Australian socialist republic from the 1920s on flowing from a revolution during the First World War. It was, however, censored for political reasons at the time: the censors demanded that 400 lines be cut, including references to National Security regulations and how they contradicted the democratic principles for which the war was supposedly being fought.

Speculating on the Republic

On 3 August 2010 Independent Australia published the the first review ever undertaken on the republican speculative fiction genre in Australia.

It seems strange there is no tradition of republican speculative fiction in Australia. It is through speculative fiction that change can begin. We can’t achieve anything unless we imagine it first. Before every great invention and before every great journey is the idea. Without ideas and imagination, we are all trapped in the past.

Republic - 'The Land Itself '

In 2000, the Australian speculative fiction writer Sean Williams published in Eidolon. The Journal of Australian Science Fiction and Fantasy, Vol.7, No.2 (No.29/30) the story he had written too late for the 1998 Aurealis Republic issue.

Williams’ decribes ‘The Land Itself’ as “not just a post-human take on the whole Republic issue, but as post-Australia (if that’s a thing).”

One of the Australian colonies wants to secede from the motherland and its envoy has to jump through several increasingly strange hoops to do it. He follows this up in 2005 with his second novel, The Resurrected Man which is set in a future Australia (2069) that was part of the United Republics of Australia in which ‘Old Stott-Despoja’ had just been voted in for another term.

Australian identity, Australian literature and an Australian republic

On 7 July 2010, David Donovan wrote in Online Opinion that a major reason for an Australian republic is to aid the further development of a distinct and unique Australian identity. This identity comes through the way we think about ourselves and our nation: the stories we tell, the songs we sing, our legends and our myths. From our literature and popular fiction, we can see that Australia has built a narrative about who we are as a nation, and new chapters are being added all the time as the national identity is updated with each new era.

As part of this process, the Australian Republican Movement runs an annual speculative fiction short story competition. Entries close in August for the current installment of this competition. This year, writers are asked to present stories about Australia’s republican future, under the theme “Life and Death in the Australian Republic”.

There is no real tradition of speculative republican fiction in Australia. A great many of Australia’s most important works of fiction look towards our past rather than ahead. Moreover, with some exceptions rather than preferring bright and optimistic tales, the stories with which we seem to most identify have a strong sense of adversity, injustice and persecution at their core.

Crown's don't sit well

In Tohby Riddle's, The Royal Guest, (Hodder & Stoughton, 1993; Puffin 2008) the Queen is planning a trip to Australia, but there is talk about the cost. Luckily, a Mrs Jones from Padstow offers to put her up. She has plenty of room, not to mention a very comfortable inflatable mattress. All the Queen needs to bring is a her own sleeping bag.

Over the next few days, the Queen experiences everyday suburban life, playing cards with Mrs Jones and her friends and helping Mrs Jones take her cat to the vet on her way to a meeting with the Prime Minister.

After a hectic round of royal engagement, the Queen returns to spend her last night at Padstow. Before she leaves the next moring, she hands Mrs Jones a thankyou gift. It is the most delicately, crafted jewelled crown, one of the Queen's old favourites. Mrs Jones, who is busy packing the Queen's lunch, accepts the crown, joking that this must make her 'the Queen of Padstow'.

Although this is where the story ends, republican historian Mark McKenna has reflected on the crowning of Mrs Jones. In Symbols of Australia (2010), p.33 he wrote:

I've often imagined Mrs Jones sitting at her kitchen table, carefully placing the crown on her head. How strange it must have felt, this crown that jarred with her clothes and refused to sit straight on her hair. If the neighbours caught sight of her, they'd probably have thought she'd gone mad. After all, what good is a crown in Padstow? We know nothing of how long Mrs Jones reigned in her realm of Padstow, or whether she managed to find any loyal subjects, although given the wry delivery of her final line it would seem unlikely she persisted with the fantasy of being the Queen of Padstow.

The sight of any Australian wearing the crown of royalty - like the sight of the crowned Mrs Jones in Padstow - seems frankly absurd. Crowns do not sit well on Australian heads.