The Dream Girl's Garden - Dorothy Hewett

If autobiographical discourse is a mythologising practice that explores, rehearses and confronts the collective anxieties and beliefs of the culture then personal story will always be a metonym for deep and complex narratives about the contradictions and forces that shape the culture as a whole. And, since autobiography is predominantly concerned with origins and genesis, these metonymic stories about the discovery of self in the mirror world of the past can be seen as windows into the historical process whereby the entire culture understands, invents and constructs itself.