“The Whole Island is a Jail and We the Warders” : States of Exception in Tasmanian Historical Fiction
Looking at two historical romances by women writers, Kathleen Graves’ Exile: A Tale of Old Tasmania (1945) and Isabel Dick’s Wild Orchard (1946), this article seeks to examine narratives of an early nineteenth-century Van Diemen’s Land that are apparently at odds with the 1940s Tasmania it was to become. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s “state of exception” as the theoretical underpinnings for this es