World War II is widely understood as the endpoint of the progressive narrative of ’World History’. The conventional critical narrative of Australia’s post-war literature, however, identifies a dominant mythopoeic tendency of quest, often bound up with narratives of colonial discovery and settlement. Through this lens, Australian literature of this period appears to be driven by the outmoded teleologies and linear imperatives that underpinned the obsolete narrative of World History. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, however, the apparent retrogression of Australian literature appears more complex. Eleanor Dark’s The Timeless Land (1941) provides a blistering critique of the Bildungsroman in the context of colonialism and the failed quests of Patrick White’s eponymous hero in Voss (1957) and of Stephen Heriot in Randolph Stow’s To the Islands (1958), which do not repeat the narrative of European discovery so much as expose and exhaust its operations. Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus, published in 1980 but set in the period immediately after World War II, makes this process explicit and provides, inter alia, a framework for reconsidering the Australian post-war novel as a reckoning with World History that links the practices of colonialism with the catastrophe of the war.

The chapter addresses the constructive elements of a theory of human rights: a theory of goods (important enough to satisfy a threshold criterium), a political theory of human rights and the normative foundations of the legitimacy of human rights. The chapter develops a political theory of human rights. To this end, it surveys the most prevalent critiques of human rights, including arguments that human rights are inefficient, that they lack instrumental rationality, that they are means to economic disempowerment and that they legitimize illegitimate structures of power. Postcolonial theories of human rights are discussed, as are feminist accounts. The democratic function of human rights is reconstructed. Arendt’s aporia of human rights is the focus of further thoughts. Part of the political theory of human rights is a theory of entrenchment, their role in protecting the political subjectivity of persons and their role in constituting communities. A central thesis is that a political theory of human rights must be firmly anchored in the lessons that the Holocaust taught about the importance of the protection of human rights.