In Defence of “the lesser cousin of history”: An Interview with Rohan Wilson

Authors

  • Hamish Dalley Daemen College
  • Rohan Wilson

Keywords:

Rohan Wilson, contemporary Australian fiction, the historical novel, the history wars, postcolonial guilt

Abstract

In this interview, the Australian historical novelist Rohan Wilson discusses the intellectual, aesthetic, and political challenges of writing fiction about the colonial frontier. He highlights the tension between a widespread desire for knowledge of the "true" or actual past, and the novelist's freedom to explore human experience beyond the archive. He talks in particular about his first novel, The Roving Party, which explores genocide on the Tasmanian frontier, and its continuities with his newest work, set on the island a generation after the defeat of the Indigenous resistance.

Author Biographies

Hamish Dalley, Daemen College

Hamish Dalley has recently taken up a position as Assistant Professor of English at Daemen College, Amherst, New York. His research explores the intersection between historical knowledge and literary inventiveness, especially in Anglophone postcolonial contexts and settings in which the past is subject to public debate. His book, Postcolonialism and the Historical Novel: Realism, Allegory, and the Representation of Contested Pasts, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2014, and his articles have appeared in journals that include Research in African Literatures, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, and The Journal of Postcolonial Writing.

Rohan Wilson

Rohan Wilson is a writer and critic. He is the author of two novels, The Roving Party and To Name Those Lost. The Roving Party received several awards, including The Australian/Vogel's Literary Award, the UTS Glenda Adams award in 2012, and the Margaret Scott prize in 2013. He holds degrees and diplomas from the universities of Tasmania, Southern Queensland and Melbourne, and at present teaches creative writing at Queensland University of Technology. His PhD dissertation was on the topic of fiction’s problematic relationship with history and the ways in which the Australian novel imagines its connection to the past. He lives in Launceston, Tasmania.

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Published

2014-11-26

Issue

Vol. 45 No. 4 (2014): October 2014

Section

Interviews

License

Copyright for articles published in this journal is retained by the Journal.