Subverting Social Order: Recovering the Intelligent Woman Farmer in John Naish’s That Men Should Fear (1963)

Smyth, Elizabeth

Abstract

In a 1985 lecture, Australian literary scholar Bruce Bennett said that people associated with farming are commonly regarded as intellectually impoverished. John Naish’s farm novel That Men Should Fear (1963) subverts the literary social order that Bennett described by portraying a farmer who is characterised as highly educated. Naish’s first novel, The Cruel Field (1962), has appeared in recent georgic studies and ecocritical scholarship, and in analyses of the migrant experience and labour systems. In this article, I recover his second novel, That Men Should Fear, and argue that Naish’s characterisation of the farmer as university educated subverts the literary “scale of civilisation” noted by Bennett while enabling insights into a class division based on ownership of farmland. This article centres on Naish’s portrayal of a strong and independent woman farmer at a time when women felt sidelined in Australian literature and society. I argue that Naish’s That Men Should Fear reshapes the genre of the Australian farm novel by expanding traditional representations of women and class. It also enriches the farmer’s perspective offered in Naish’s The Cruel Field.

Journal

Journal of Australian Studies

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Journal of Australian Studies

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ISBN/ISSN

1835-6419

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Routledge

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DOI

10.1080/14443058.2025.2558699