Smyth, Elizabeth (2025) Subverting Social Order: Recovering the Intelligent Woman Farmer in John Naish’s That Men Should Fear (1963). Journal of Australian Studies. (In Press)

Preview

PDF (Published Version) - Published Version Available under License Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives. Download (619kB) | Preview

Abstract

In a 1985 lecture, Australian literary scholar Bruce Bennett said that people associated with farming are commonly regarded as intellectually impoverished. John Naish’s farm novel That Men Should Fear (1963) subverts the literary social order that Bennett described by portraying a farmer who is characterised as highly educated. Naish’s first novel, The Cruel Field (1962), has appeared in recent georgic studies and ecocritical scholarship, and in analyses of the migrant experience and labour systems. In this article, I recover his second novel, That Men Should Fear, and argue that Naish’s characterisation of the farmer as university educated subverts the literary “scale of civilisation” noted by Bennett while enabling insights into a class division based on ownership of farmland. This article centres on Naish’s portrayal of a strong and independent woman farmer at a time when women felt sidelined in Australian literature and society. I argue that Naish’s That Men Should Fear reshapes the genre of the Australian farm novel by expanding traditional representations of women and class. It also enriches the farmer’s perspective offered in Naish’s The Cruel Field.

Item ID:	88922
Item Type:	Article (Research - C1)
ISSN:	1835-6419
Keywords:	class; John Naish; farm novel; North Queensland; women
Copyright Information:	© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Date Deposited:	25 Sep 2025 01:16
FoR Codes:	47 LANGUAGE, COMMUNICATION AND CULTURE > 4705 Literary studies > 470502 Australian literature (excl. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander literature) @ 100%
SEO Codes:	13 CULTURE AND SOCIETY > 1302 Communication > 130203 Literature @ 100%
	More Statistics