Epidemics in Australian Literature

Epidemics in Australian Literature: Disease Histories and Health Futures traces the presence and operation of disease in Australian literature. British colonisation brought novel diseases to the Australian continent and literary practices of these diseases' representation. Analysing epidemic diseases such as smallpox, Hansen’s disease (leprosy), bubonic plague, influenza, HIV/AIDS and COVID-19, this book asks how Australian literature incorporates these disease events into narrative and examines the patterns of representation identifiable in a range of texts written from the 19th century to today. It asks what diseases mean in Australian culture; why some diseases, such as smallpox, HIV/AIDS and COVID-19, prompt vociferous debates about their existence and virulence; and how understandings of illness and health continue to be shaped by social perceptions that run deep in Australian society.

Illness and disease are everyday human experiences, yet they are also singular and consuming events. Given this paradox of disease – simultaneously commonplace and yet always different and novel – Australian literature offers a distinctive window into individual experiences of illness and health. Diseases, and especially epidemics, are also collective experiences: by contrasting varying textual representations of epidemics and examining a range of diseases, Epidemics in Australian Literature shows that experiences of illness and disease were and continue to be uneven and inequitable. This monograph argues that, while a significant majority of texts represent disease in distressing yet unsurprising ways – for instance as racial contagion, as the consequence of class mobility or as an effect of changing gender and sexual politics – Australian literary culture fosters an alternate practice which resists these representations.

Given their human significance, epidemics linger in the imagination. Comparing contemporaneous accounts of epidemics with modern-day renderings, Epidemics in Australian Literature identifies an emergent affirmation of health, where contemporary Australian writers and storytellers, often contributing from positions of alterity or marginality, advance visions for a healthier Australia. In doing so, these texts resist deficit-informed readings of disease, instead envisioning the creation of just, equitable and more healthy futures for the Australian continent in the present.