Presented by Assoc Prof Nicole Moore (UNSW) as part of the Humanities Research Centre Seminar Series

In a preface to the first published edition of Dorothy Hewett’s The Chapel Perilous, she notes of its heroine: “For many young women Sally Banner is the first modern liberated feminist in our literature: I believe this is an historical and literary accident” (Hewett, xix). In this paper I investigate the performative moment of The Chapel Perilous, which premiered at the Fortune Theatre in Perth on 21 January, 1971, in order to think further about the relationship between this complexly explosive play and its explosive times. 1971 is at the apex of the period described by historian Donald Horne as Australia’s Time of Hope: the year when the new social movements, including feminism and sexual liberation, gained mainstream consensus for transformative political and cultural change. I tease out the ways in which such an a historical play, with its mythic structures, inter-medial experimentation and iconoclastic theatricality, becomes history, and precisely performative history, in so far as we can conceive such. Simultaneously, we can ask how this play represents, perhaps oppositely, a “literary accident”. What might we mean by the accidental literary? Developing these ideas for an essay in the Reading Australia project, this paper situates The Chapel Perilous in a complex of debates about the contemporary teaching canon, at once contesting and making the recent past for literary and performative history.

Nicole Moore is Associate Professor in the English Program at the School of Humanities and Social Sciences, ADFA, University of New South Wales and her main research interests are in Australian literature, broadly defined, with a specific focus on the history of book censorship and literary publishing. She is the author of The Censor's Library: Literary Censorship in Twentieth-Century Australia (forthcoming with University of Queensland Press) and co-author (with Marita Bullock) of Banned in Australia, an electronic bibliography of literary titles banned in Australia from 1901-1973 hosted by AustLit: The Australian Literature Resource at www.austlit.edu.au. She has published widely on twentieth-century Australian literature, particularly women's writing of the mid-century, and was contributing editor to the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature (Allen and Unwin, 2009) for the period 1900-1950.  She is reviews editor of Australian Feminist Studies, Australia's premier gender studies journal, and coordinates the English Program at UNSW, Canberra at the Australian Defence Force Academy. A new collaborative project on the publication of Australian books in the German Democratic Republic is funded by a Group of Eight/DAAD joint collaborative research scheme grant for 2011-2012.