That Men Should Fear: Subverting a Literary Social Order of City to Farms

In a 1985 lecture published by the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies, Bruce Bennett states that the ‘world of farms … is commonly thought to be inhabited by slow wits’ (41). John Naish’s farm novel That Men Should Fear (1963) subverts a literary social order that Bennett describes as descending from metropolitan intelligence and sophistication to agrarian ignorance and artlessness. Recent articles have drawn attention to Naish, a formerly overlooked author, through readings on the georgic, ecocritical, and migrant experience. In this essay, I argue that Naish’s characterisation of the farmer as an educated medical doctor subverts the literary ‘scale of civilization’ noted by Bennett to a greater extent than other major writers of Australian farm novels. A comparative study of the agrarian protagonist in Jean Devanny’s Cindie: A Chronicle of the Canefields (1949) clarifies the literary order against which Naish wrote and marks his final work as the zenith of a progressive oeuvre.

N/A

4th Australian Literary Convention: Chaos and Order

N/A

N/A

N/A

N/A

13