How to write of a white feminine I so as not to tell – once more – the story of the woman we already know, the woman we take ourselves to be? The answer might lie in a kind of writing that gives a formal place to uncertainty. This would be a writing practice that aims at a writer's doubts about herself and others, rather than closing them over, and which works with an aesthetics of uncertainty and not just a vocabulary. Such a writing practice would also aim at the production of doubt in a reader. If aesthetics is concerned with the senses, then what aesthetics is it that can produce feelings of unsettlement and doubt, in particular in white writers and their readers – about themselves and their place in (neo)colonial Australia?

The British artist Frank Auerbach has said that ‘to paint the same head over and over leads you to its unfamiliarity’ (Suleiman 1991). This is an art practice through which the visual artist does not so much come into knowledge as abandon the knowledge he or she had. It is art as relinquishment, a practice that brings both artist and viewer into a position of estrangement before the once-familiar face, and recalls Francis Bacon's commitment to the art of accident, error and excess (Francis Bacon in Sylvester 1987). In the literary arts, too, many practitioners aim at accident and error rather than representation. As Anne Carson says, ‘what we are engaged in when we do poetry is error, / the willful creation of error, / the deliberate break and complication of mistakes / out of which may arise / unexpectedness. / …. The fact of the matter for humans is imperfection’ (Carson 2000, 35). This, then, is a decided move away from more realist modes that invite the author to take up the position of the one who already knows what is there, awaiting representation.

Bringing estrangement, excess, and accident into the literary arts has been a preoccupation of some feminist theorists interested in how a feminine subject writes and is written. This takes another inflection in the colonial context when the question becomes: who is the white woman and through what writing practices is she written as white?