AustLit
Latest Issues
Notes
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Only literary material by Australian authors individually indexed.
Contents
- Stuart Devlin’s Sculpturei"Modern coins the sizes of shine", single work poetry (p. 11)
- Be Advisedi"Be advised,", single work poetry (p. 21)
- Americans Are so Politei"All that “Mr President”,", single work poetry (p. 21)
- Todayi"Today is my birthday.", single work poetry (p. 31)
- Emergency Wardi"In this mad-house", single work poetry (p. 31)
- Emergency Ward IIi"What words so lovely", single work poetry (p. 31)
- Touched on the Rawi"“That’s a flash hat mate, a bit", single work poetry (p. 53)
- Wallabies, Hill Endi"A black faced wallaby", single work poetry (p. 74)
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Grape-Picking,
single work
essay
'Sarah Holland-Batt has truly disappointed with her stewardship of Best Australian Poems 2016. She did not follow her own guidelines for submissions, and thereby misled every poet submitting to this anthology, resulting in the omission of at least thirty poets who could have been included.' (Introduction)
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The Old Quarrel,
single work
essay
'Michael Giffin announces his intention early in Patrick White and God, after describing White’s personal-cum-tribal relationship with the Anglican Church:
This book attempts to locate Patrick White’s fiction within a 200-year phase in western philosophy and aesthetics beginning with romanticism in the late 18th century. The attempt is ambitious because his fiction is a critique of western consciousness, in particular its understanding of reason; however, his critique looks like a metaphysics—and perhaps a metapsychology—now challenged by an unstable marriage of promethean science and intersectional politics. Because of this, his religious frame—which remained remarkably consistent during his career—is harder to recognize in the 21st century. (Introduction)
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Dubious Sources,
single work
essay
'Someone gave me, as a Christmas present, Mark Tedeschi’s book Murder at Myall Creek. It is not a bad read, though some things are left unexplained, and the book has no index. My criticism of the book arises from its somewhat dubious scholarship.' (Introduction)
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Emerging from Our Shells,
single work
essay
'With one small qualification I’ll come to, I enjoyed this book. It comprises twenty-five pages of illustration followed by twenty-six poems, and the integration of the two art forms is most skilfully done. Indeed, if artfulness were not in its present epoch of beggary, then the exquisite watercolour illuminations of shells and marine mortuary here, together with these shapely poems, might merit being placed within a finessed sample of bookcraft, hardcover, saddle-stitched, marbled endpapers and tasselled bookmark such as that quiet craftsman Alec Bolton used to create on his Brindabella Press. But the paperback we have from RMIT University Link yields a volume workaday and effective enough. In the first half of the book it displays nautilus, cone shell, seahorse, conch, each with an arresting singularity on a creamy page, while the poems that commence halfway through disclose Morgan-Shae’s commitment to the wrought-ness of verbal art, shapeliness as a presence-in-words for ear, eye and intellect.' (Introduction)
- Sireni"Wendy remembers the miners of the village,", single work poetry (p. 92)
- Tonight's Scotchi"Tarpaper hobos–holed socks who kip beneath", single work poetry (p. 97)
- Matchstick Housei"My mother's present to me", single work poetry (p. 101)
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The Paternoster,
single work
short story
'I n winter in Hamburg—the busiest port in Europe—when gangways are slippery and frozen handrails take the skin off an ungloved hand, when the wind along the Elbe is like a razor around your ears, and in the many harbour channels where traffic is least, you can find sheets of ice as big as a tabletop which rock and clack together as barges and tenders and tugs nudge their way through, and snowdrifts pile up at the entrance to our shipping office at the dockside.' (Introduction)
- Pigeons of the Domei"From here on the balcony we see them: pigeons", single work poetry (p. 110)
- Dearly Departed, single work prose (p. 112)