AustLit

'Susan Stanford Friedman argues that modernisms are multiple, polycentric and recurrent. This article takes up her invitation to focus on the circulation of people and ideas that connected modernisms from different parts of the planet by reconsidering two moments in the literature of colonial Queensland as instances of proleptic modernism. The publications of Policy and Passion by Rosa Praed in 1881 in London, and of the ‘The Red Snake’ by Francis Adams in 1888 in Brisbane encapsulate early manifestations of the cultural unease and destabilisation that drove the development of modernism/s as the expressive domain of modernity/ies. Striking thematic and stylistic parallels with the work of canonical modernists — HD in the case of Praed, and Conrad in the case of Adams — suggest not only that modernism began to manifest itself in Anglophone culture much earlier than is generally conceded, but also that the cognitive dissonance generated by the colonial experience was centrally implicated in its development.' (Publication abstract)

'Pat Hanna's Famous Diggers, a professional vaudeville theatre troupe comprising ex-Great War Anzac soldiers (initially, mainly New Zealanders, as Hanna was himself) played for nearly two years (1923–24) at the old Cremorne Theatre in Brisbane. One item Hanna premiered at the Cremorne was Louis XI, a short (ten-minute) comic sketch he wrote himself. Modernism in the inter-war years, given its usual location within avant-garde aesthetics, high culture, internationalism and radical politics, is not — with the notable exception of Brecht's cabaret work in the 1920s — usually associated with popular theatre. While one comic playlet hardly challenges that positioning, Louis XI was a direct result of the Great War's profound reshaping of modern life. Many of the dramatised sketches performed by Hanna's company, including Louis XI, were structured around a contrast between events as they had occurred in the trenches and as they were portrayed in a utopian or dystopian fantasy, sometimes triggered by shell shock or a dream. Several, again including Louis XI, involve the past, and express the curiosity and cultural dislocation Australian- and New Zealand-born soldiers felt as they moved for the first time through real-life landscapes and architecture they had known only from popular history and romance.' (Introduction)

'The script of Louis XI used as the basis for this edition is the only known surviving version, a typescript on lined foolscap held in the National Archives of Australia, Canberra, in the Copyright Applications Series CRS A1336/1 item 14,222. It appears to have been typed from an earlier script that has not survived — probably a much-amended manuscript given numerous transcription errors, and was not subsequently corrected. As a consequence, it retains traces of that earlier version. Its title, typed in caps at the top of each page, is ‘SHELL SHOCK’, but on the first page this has been crossed through and ‘Louis XI’ written in heavy black ink, followed by ‘written and produced by GP Hanna at Cremorne Theatre Brisbane/1924’.' (Introduction)

'Brisbane has sometimes been represented as a bulwark of literary traditionalism against the advances of poetic modernism in the southern capitals during the first half of the twentieth century. But as William Hatherell showed in The Third Metropolis, modernism had a brief but intense flourishing in the northern city during and immediately after World War II. This article traces the reception and practice of poetic modernism in Brisbane even earlier than that, in the period between the wars, both in the form of a vigorous critical debate over ‘modernistic poetry’ in the Courier-Mail and elsewhere, and also in the composition and publication of a significant quantity of self-consciously modernist poetry in Brisbane's evening daily, the Telegraph, with the active encouragement of the paper's literary editor, Colin Bingham, from 1930 to 1939.' (Introduction)

'The broad brush strokes of Dorothy Cottrell's paintings in the National Library of Australia mark her as a modernist artist, although not one who painted the burgeoning Sydney Harbour Bridge or bright still-life paintings of Australian flora. Rather, she captured the dun surrounds of Ularunda Station, the remote Queensland property to which she moved in 1920 after attending art school in Sydney. At Ularunda, Cottrell eloped with the bookkeeper to Dunk Island, where they stayed with nature writer E.J. Banfield, then relocated to Sydney. In 1924 they returned to Ularunda and Cottrell swapped her paintbrush for a pen, writing The Singing Gold. After advice from Mary Gilmore, whom her mother accosted in a pub, Cottrell send it to the Ladies Home Journal in America. It was snapped up immediately, optioned for a film and found a publisher in England, who described it as ‘a great Australian book, and a world book’. Gilmore added, ‘As an advertisement for Australia, it will go far — the Ladies Home Journal is read all over the world’. Cottrell herself also went far, emigrating to America, where she wrote The Silent Reefs, set in the Caribbean. Cottrell's creative, intellectual and physical peregrinations — all undertaken in a wheelchair after she contracted polio at age five — show how the local references the international, and vice versa. Through an analysis of the life and writing of this now little-known Queensland author, this essay reflects the regional and transnational elements of modernism as outlined in Neal Alexander and James Moran's Regional Modernisms, illuminating how a crack-shot with a rifle once took Queensland to the world.' (Publication abstract)

'Criena Rohan's The Delinquents (1962) has always had a cult appeal — in 1989 it was made into a movie, starring Kylie Minogue as Lola and an unknown American as Brownie — and was recently reissued as a Text Classic. A short novel written by a writer who did not have a long career, and published between more commonly scrutinised periods of Australian fiction, The Delinquents is still, however, liminal. The Delinquents is very much a novel of rebellion and subversion, as its teenage protagonists, Brownie Hansen and Lola Lovell, pursue their love over the opposition of both sets of parents the police, the bourgeois consensus and everybody who is not them. By the fiery smoldering of its passion, though, their love sustains them and they emerge at the end, buffeted but united and resilient. This article argues that Rohan's book represents a Queensland iteration of a ‘regional modernism’.' (Introduction)

'Eleanor Dark's last published novel, Lantana Lane (published 1959), is not usually included in accounts of Australian modernism. The novel's strong criticisms of modernity, its regional focus and the Cold War context complicate its inclusion as a modernist text. However, revised understandings of modernism generated in the past few decades of scholarship allow for a reinvestigation of Dark's novel as a response to the conditions of late modernity. In particular, Dark explores the pressures exerted on local space by modern capitalism in a period of post-war reconstruction, showing how the national and global scales encroach upon and threaten to annihilate local particularity. Through drawing on a number of broadly modernist practices, including those of entanglement, suspension, metageography and primitivism, Dark pushes back against modernity's narratives of progress and attempts to recover space for the literary and the small scale. Lantana Lane demonstrates how ‘regional modernisms’ written from ‘peripheral’ locations can draw attention to the uneven distribution of modernity within national and global space, and offer alternative — if provisional — sites of attachment.' (Publication abstract)

'New Impulses in Australian Poetry was an anthology of contemporary Australian poetry published in Brisbane in 1968. The book was the idea of two Queensland poets, Rodney Hall and Thomas Shapcott. New Impulses was modelled on international modern poetry anthologies. At the time, this type of anthology was unfamiliar in Australia. Hall and Shapcott declared their intentions in modernist terms: to challenge the literary establishment and to promote the new poetry of the 1960s. It was a new type of anthology for a new type of poetry. This article explores the anthology's Queensland origins and examines its modern themes and influences. It concludes with a discussion of the anthology's impact and legacy from the perspective of Australian literary history, especially the ‘New Australian Poetry’, which it prefigured. In addition to its literary significance, New Impulses was an Australian publishing milestone. The book was the first poetry anthology published by University of Queensland Press. Its success demonstrated the market potential for literary publishing in Australia.' (Publication abstract)

'David Malouf's novel Fly Away Peter (1982) uses modernist techniques to describe the impact of modernity on the emergent Australian nation. At its centre is the country lad Jim Saddler, who dies in the industrialised battlefield in France. His fate is entwined with that of his friend Ashley Crowther, who inherits his family's property, and whose embrace of modernity includes a determination to preserve the land and its wildlife. Ashley recognises the value of Jim's instinctive connection with the natural world, and his knowledge of, and fascination with, birds. This fascination aligns Jim with the photographer Imogen Harcourt. Miss Harcourt is a modern woman, using the new technologies of representation to record the natural world, its movement and change. At the novella's end, it is Imogen who turns her lens towards a new future, as her grief for Jim is transfigured through an epiphanic vision of a surfer riding the waves to the beach.' (Publication abstract)

'‘Flight’ as a narrative of escape pervades Australian literature. In his article ‘Decomposing suburbia: Patrick White’s perversity’ (1998: 56), Andrew McCann argues that its prevalence establishes the trajectory as a prerequisite to self-actualisation, whereby a protagonist can only be fully developed (in the narratalogical and psychological sense) via acts of corporeal relocation. Moreover, the ubiquity of flight implies states of restlessness and discontentment, of unresolved yearning, as recurrent characteristics of Australian fiction.' (Introduction)

'In his introduction to The Pearl King, Robert Lehane quotes a journalist who, in 1932, expresses hope that the Brisbane businessman James Clark might some day be induced to ‘give the story of his life to the world . . . a moving epic of flood and field, of early sailoring days full of thrills’. James Clark never did write his life’s story. He died the following year. But with Lehane’s new book we are fortunate, finally, to have Clark’s biography.' (Introduction)