Mapping a Memoir within Australian Landscapes: Shirley Walker

Shirley Walker (1927), retired Senior Lecturer in English from the University of New England at Armidale, where she taught Australian Literature, decided to try her own hand at writing a memoir. The result is Roundabout at Bangalow: An Intimate Chronicle (2001), which is her account of growing up in the Northern Rivers area of New South Wales in Australia. The author has also published numerous critical articles on Australian Literature, commenting thoroughly on the work of Mary Gilmore (1865- 1962), Judith Wright (1915-2000) and Dorothy Hewett (1923-2002). Walker has also published The Ghost at the Wedding (2009) based on the life of Walker’s mother in law, a woman whose life was largely shaped by war, and who, in 1918 near the end of WW1, married a returned soldier. This biography, which was awarded the Asher Literary Prize (2009) and the Nita B Kibble Award (2010), Australia’s premier award for women’s writing, has been described as a major work of Australian literature and a major contribution to Australian history. The present article focuses on Roundabout at Bangalow: An Intimate Chronicle, where Walker narrates the complicated and, sometimes, blurred resonances of her “half-a-lifetime” memoir. This work exemplifies how Walker is deeply concerned with the unreliability of memory and the way it can exaggerate grievances or distort past perceptions, unloosing itself from historical and geographical truth and adopting first and foremost a primal function in the formation of identities.