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Abstract :
[en] In an interview, Australian novelist, essayist, and academic Gail Jones claimed an interest in psycho-geography, i.e. “in the idea,” as she puts it, “that we must walk around our own place with an active intelligence and with a degree of radical attention to what is there.” Taking Sydney as an example, Jones insists on the importance of looking at the city’s “shapes, its motions,” of attending to its “sounds, corridors between spaces, the unexpected.” It is, she continues, “about apprehending things through shapes and signs.” Sydney, to her, is a place haunted by its colonial inheritance, and Australia, more generally, is a “colony of trauma”, a place where “there is always a tension between remembering and forgetting.” Thus time and space are merged, or to put it as Jones does, “within the material spaces of a city are these immaterial traces of something else.” Along the same lines, Jones distinguishes between a vertical and a horizontal history: on the one hand, she explains, “there is the history that seems to be unfolding and moving forward,” while on the other hand there is a “plunging down into the interiority of the place, into its lost history.” This merging together of time and space, of history and geography is an inherent attribute of cosmopolitanism as it finds an echo in Jones’s novel Five Bells, which takes place on a single day in cosmopolitan Sydney and draws together four characters with their different national backgrounds, haunting histories and memories, all converging on Circular Quay, an Aboriginal site also marked as the place where Captain Cook first set foot. Focusing on the characters’ migrant perceptions of this historical and iconic site, my paper will seek to investigate how Jones draws on the trope of temporal and spatial inheritance in Five Bells to offer “ethical understanding” as an alternative to today’s embattled conception of Australian national identity.