Dancing with Australian feminism: Helen Garner’s Postcards from Surfers viewed from a Buginese perspective with a partial translation into Indonesian

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy%%%%This study is a literary analysis on five stories from Helen Garner’s Postcards from Surfers. This study also translates these five stories from English into Indonesian and discusses some challenges that occurred in the process of translation. The aim of the study is to investigate Garner’s feminist ideas as reflected in the stories from Postcards from Surfers viewed from a Buginese perspective. The five stories are “Postcard from Surfers”, “La Chance Existe”, “The Art of Life”, “All Young Bloody Catholics”, and “Civilization and Discontents”. Through these stories, how Garner expresses her feminist ideas are juxtaposed with Buginese culture. By using Edward Said’s work on contrapuntal reading, Mohanty’s feminist-as-explorer model, and Lazar’s Critical Discourse Analysis, I move back and forth between Buginese culture and Australian culture to consider how Australian women and men are represented and how mainstream Australian society engages with, or challenges discourses of patriarchy and power. This movement back and forth I have theorised as “dancing”. My study examines the potential dialogue between Australian culture and Buginese culture in terms of feminism and its resulting cultural hybridity where some Australian feminist thoughts are applicable to Buginese culture but some are not. From this dialogue, it is found that both Australian women and Buginese women have their own sets of issues stemming from male domination. The way they empower themselves to resist are also different. Therefore, my study centres a Buginese standpoint while dialoguing with Australian feminisms.