Unfortunately the pagination wasn't included in the version I was able to access.
For overseas readers, the often lyrical description of the landscape and the depiction of an ultimately benign way of life will contribute to tourist and migration promotion stereotypes of this being indeed a `lucky' country. Some Mills and Boon authors write apparently with deliberately patriotic, even nationalistic intentions: "I like to sell Australia to the rest of the world", says Margaret Way, a Brisbane author who has written more than sixty Mills and Boon novels, all set in Australia.
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if the texts are not racist in their endorsed attitudes, it can be argued that they draw on established racist discourses to construct the narratives. This is not just a matter of neither hero nor heroine, nor other main characters being Black. For that matter, these characters are not working class, and only rarely Migrant. It is more a matter of the texts, like myths of Australian history, being structured around an Aboriginal absence with, by and large, only their traces remaining in white man's (and woman's) narratives.
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Reading the contradictions in the symbolic structures of romantic fiction from the viewpoint of national and racial histories is, thus, politically essential. It is not just a matter of bringing romantic fiction up from under but of examining what else lies beneath it. We need to unravel the metaphors of the text's spoken dreams, and to discover what the structures of those dreams repress. Australian Mills and Boon, for instance, resolve white fears and guilt by repressing the desires of Aborigines, men and women. For critics, gaining rooms of our own in the literary institutions will be a limited victory while Eliza Dolittle and her Black and Migrant sisters remain outside the walls in the cold; unable, effectively, to speak.
Unfortunately the pagination wasn't included in the version I was able to access.
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