Mildura, Chaffeys, Irrigation!' Alice Lapthorne's Literary Placemaking

This paper will explore the literary work of place-making through a case study from regional Victoria. Alice Lapthorne’s Mildura Calling (1946, 1965, 1981) is a work of creative non-fiction that for decades was circulated as the definitive account of Mildura, the largest town in the agricultural Victorian Mallee region. The work is still in print and remains the only book length account of Mildura’s history despite efforts to produce new ones. Rather than a definitive history, however, what Lapthorne’s text showcases is the performative capacity of literary works to both create and sustain narratives that ultimately become compelling fictions of place. This includes the text’s performative and preemptive mourning of a First Nations world, while contributing powerfully to this erroneous placestory. Understanding how ‘non-fiction’ works such as Lapthorne’s are positioned and circulated as benign and without the need for critical reflexivity demonstrates the complicity of literary texts in violent and enduring modes of place-making. Through discussion of a Mildura-based book club chat about Mildura Calling, we seek to open up wider conversations about literary place-making that destabilise naturalised narratives of place, and creates spaces for other stories, including the recognition of enduring First Nations presence in colonised Country.