AustLit

'Given that the Sunshine Coast and its hinterland have been, at least for a time, the haunt of several of several eminent Australian writers — the Palmers, Dark, Herbert, Astley, Wright, Cato, Williamson and Carey, to name a few — it seemed worth asking whether the principal, and for most of the twentieth century the only, newspaper servicing the region since 1903 — the Nambour Chronicle and the North Coast Advertiser — was part of a literary culture to which these writers felt they belonged and were contributing in the first half of the century. If not, why not? And if so, what kinds of contributions did it make to that culture? The tentative finding is that while the Chronicle did not make the kinds of direct, ‘homegrown’ contributions that some other metropolitan and provincial newspapers did, it maintained a literary presence and function by means of a regular diet of imported features, and by its particularly close and consistent relationship with the Nambour Town Library (and also, less consistently, with various School of Arts libraries in the district). The continuing connection between these two Nambour institutions — the Chronicle and the library — was personal and familial as well as civic in nature, and clearly suited the literary demands and expectations of a highly dispersed community that found its unity and identity by other means.' (Abstract)

'Vance and Nettie Palmer were among Australia's most important literary partnerships. Previous accounts of their life and work underplay their commitment to the creation of an environmental imagination. After the trauma and disillusion of the Great War, they lived in Caloundra from 1925 to 1929 (and from then had an ongoing connection). While it is generally acknowledged how important their time there was in terms of Vance's emerging work in literary fiction, and through Nettie's work as a freelance journalist, what has not been addressed is their extraordinary environmental writings about the region. Regional writings were largely dismissed in the 1990s as of comparative insignificance to national narratives — just as today the reputation of the inter-war writers, those associated with the Palmers, is at a low ebb. During the 1920s, Nettie developed critical categories to accommodate a double standard in Australian writing: regional and universal literature. She went on to argue for the support of writing in Australia at the regional level. Vance reflected on his explorations of place directly in a series of articles. This paper reframes the Palmers’ Caloundra work in the ‘bio-regional’ terms of climate change and the historical cultural imaginary.' (Abstract)

'This article compares Vance Palmer's classic novel, The Passage (1930), set in Caloundra, with Susan Johnson's The Landing (2015), a comic novel of manners set at the northern end of the contemporary Sunshine Coast. It considers the novels’ different perspectives on Australian society and changing values, including attitudes to nature, arguing that Palmer's novel now seems more idealistic than realist while Johnson's cynicism about Australian life shows some disturbing elements beneath the comedy.' (Abstract)

Vance Palmer's The Passage (1930) and Eleanor Dark's Lantana Lane (1959) bracket the period during which the narrow coastal strip north of Brisbane from the Pumicestone Passage to the Noosa River was being transformed economically and culturally into what we know today as the Sunshine Coast. In the 1920s and 1950s respectively, Palmer and Dark participated in changing the region, and as established writers they reflected upon that metamorphosis in literary works that reached a national audience at a time when Brisbane's near north coast was off the beaten track for professional writers. But for millennia prior to colonisation, this area had sustained a vibrant economy and culture centred on bunyas from the mountains and seafood from the coast. By the late nineteenth century, this vast economic and cultural network had been radically disrupted by the incursions of timber-getters and pastoralists, and many of the traditional owners who had survived the frontier wars had been removed. While the inscription of a new identity on the region in the twentieth century was driven by the real estate speculators who coined the name ‘Sunshine Coast’, Palmer in The Passage and Dark in Lantana Lane share a more cooperative, sustainable, egalitarian and anti-imperialist vision for the region, with some indirect and ambiguous debts to its Aboriginal past.

'According to Judith Wright, John Blight's best poems were about the sea. From the 1940s, when he lived around the Sunshine Coast, he wrote about the rhythms of life by the sea and about human relationships with the more than human world. In the 1960s, he published 180 sonnets in two volumes, A Beachcomber's Diary and My Beachcombing Days. The sonnet form, he said, cut him down to size. This paper considers Blight's work and its engagement with the littoral zone: the seascapes and ecology of the Sunshine Coast. It attempts to hear the sea's voices — muffled, indistinct — and to illuminate Blight's ideas about its alien nature.' (Abstract)

'This article discusses Sunshine Coast writer Inga Simpson's nature writing in three recent novels, Mr Wigg (2013), Nest(2014b) and Where the Trees Were (2016c). It addresses Simpson's self-categorisation as a nature writer, and shows how the recurrent motif of sacred trees allows three introspective protagonists to reach new understandings of universal themes: loss of love and innocence, ageing, inheritance, childlessness, sexuality, death, ancient cultures, cultural integrity and preservation of the environment. The article considers Simpson's ‘anti-Gothic’ approach to landscape in her novels, yet also shows how her ‘realist’ depictions of place evoke unease surrounding the issue of white belonging in Australia. Simpson's metaphoric self-identification with trees, particularly the Australian ironbark, is pivotal to the quiet power of her fiction's exploration of belonging in the Australian landscape.' (Abstract)

'Peter Carey has said of his 2008 novel, His Illegal Self, that it grew from an image he recalled of a hippie mother and her son wandering along the edge of the Bruce Highway near Caboolture, and an American who arrived in his commune near Yandina who turned out to be a drug dealer wanted by the FBI. In typical Carey fashion, the three central characters in His Illegal Self are in the process of escaping from the narratives that have been imposed upon them, and metamorphosing into different and better selves. His Illegal Self is the first of Carey's books in which he reverses the angle of vision on the cross-cultural comparison of Australia and America that has engaged him throughout his career. This reverse comparison is set some thirty-five years in the past, against a background of the protest movements against the Vietnam War in both countries. Unlike several of his earlier novels, His Illegal Self lacks a pronounced sense of self-conscious storytelling, and this increases the direct emotional impact of the novel, intensifying the reader's empathy with the characters’ emergence from their imposed identities.'

'This article explores the traces of an author's regional identity in a transnational travel memoir in which affinities to place are portrayed as pluralistic and fluid. It does so in order to explore the tenuous balance between ecocentric understanding of self within a community of ‘earth others’ on the one hand and fidelity to a regionally precise ‘home’ on the other. 1 This constitutes an open-ended encounter with regionalism and ‘site-fidelity’ to destabilise the local/global binary. New understandings of foreign landscapes, places and cultures can be brokered upon a dialogue between those newly encountered landscape places, and the more intimately known regions from an individual's past.' (Abstract)

'During 1947 and 1948, Thea Astley's life changed in ways that permanently affected her writing. In August 1947, she obtained a transfer to Imbil State School, west of Noosa. In November she re-sat failed University of Queensland exams in economics and history, and graduated with a BA in the following April. In January 1948, Astley took up a secondary teaching post at Pomona Rural High. On 27 August, she married Jack Gregson at the Gympie Registry Office. She transferred to Brisbane for the remainder of 1948, and early in the New Year moved with her husband to Sydney. This article contrasts poetry about love and place that Astley wrote during these transition years with the themes and tone of her novel, A Descant for Gossips, published in 1960 and set in Pomona (‘Gungee’) and its environs. Dedicated ‘To John’, Astley's love poems display a passionate lyricism and a commitment that, though usually nervous and conditional, encompasses moments of settled happiness and clarity. In Descant, by contrast, moments of fulfilment in the love affair of teachers Helen Striebel and Robert Moller are suffused with guilt. Similarly, Astley's youthful response in her poetry to the beauty of the ranges and the coast collapses a decade later in Descant into a dystopic rendition of Gungee as a town that punishes defiance and crucifies difference. The article concludes by speculating about causes for the transformation.' (Abstract)

'Nancy Cato (1917–2000) was born in Adelaide and lived there for the first half of her life. Moving to Noosa in 1967, she became known for environmental activism as well as her writing. Through research for her historical novels set in Tasmania and on the Murray River, as well as her travels in Central and Northern Australia, she developed a strong interest in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. She published poetry, stories, plays and journalism, as well as novels set in the Northern Territory, North Queensland, the Riverland and Tasmania. She had a painter's eye as well as a gift for lyrics and a lifelong interest in storytelling. With the emergence of eco-criticism, we can now see her diverse career as a writer as cohering around her love of the natural world and her curiosity about how human beings lived in it. This article considers her writing about her adopted country around Noosa.' (Abstract)

While working as a dairy farmer in the Sunshine Coast hinterland during the 1920s, Jack McKinney began contributing short stories to the popular weekly, the Australian Journal. Drawing on his own experience and sense of humour, he developed these stories into a series, ‘According to Noonan’, which the Australian Journal published until 1939 and reprised in the 1950s. This article will examine these stories and consider them in relation to McKinney's later life and writing.

'This book takes its title from the ambivalent hopes and fears of the young, pregnant Nettie Palmer for her first-born, Aileen (1915–88). After graduating from the University of Melbourne with first-class honours in French, Aileen accompanied her parents on a trip to England in 1935. In her later years at university, she was caught up as a young communist in protest causes. Activism and writing were to become ‘the two great passions of her life’.' (Introduction)

'At the age of ten, Anna Wickham (1883–1947), born Edith Alice Mary Harper, promised her father that she would become a poet. She made the promise in Wickham Terrace in Brisbane, where her family lived for a period after emigrating from London. She later adopted the pseudonym ‘Anna Wickham’ in honour of this moment. Wickham’s life was strikingly transnational. She departed Australia in 1904 to study opera singing in London and Paris, and shared friendships with many prominent writers, including D.H. Lawrence, Katherine Mansfield and Dylan Thomas. Her husband, Patrick Hepburn, opposed her writing. In 1913, he had Wickham incarcerated in an asylum for several months, during which she wrote eighty more poems. By the time of her death by suicide in 1947, Wickham had written over 1,400 poems. Her work suffered some critical neglect in traditional accounts of literary modernism; however, critics are now beginning to recognise her as a significant modernist and feminist poet.' (Introduction)

'Not Just Black and White is a powerful true story of the lives of two Aboriginal women. Written by a mother and daughter, the book tells an important part of Queensland’s history and was the winner of the prestigious David Unaipon Award in 2014. On reading the book, I was reminded of other Aboriginal women’s life stories, such as Rita Huggins’ and Jackie Huggins’ 1994 narrative Aunty Rita and Ruth Hegarty’s Is That You, Ruthie? in 2003. These narratives also tell of Aboriginal women’s resilience and resistance to colonial oppression in Cherbourg, Queensland, located approximately 250 kilometres north-west of Brisbane.' (Introduction)

'This is an encompassing and evocative memoir by former Queensland Police Force (QPF) Commissioner Ray Whitrod, who wore many hats in his lifetime. However, heading Queensland’s police force between 1970 and 1976 had the most impact on his future career, social life and health. The Fitzgerald Inquiry into police corruption following the term of his successor Terry Lewis had a watershed effect on the QPF and the organisation was overhauled. Given the scarcity of insights into the political dimensions of QPF management during this time, Whitrod’s memoir will be invaluable for scholars of Australian policing and politics and its Queensland dimensions. Before I Sleep affords the reader a glimpse into the personal life of a person responsible for the formation of key national and state organisations: the Commonwealth Police, the Australian Institute of Criminology and Victims of Crime Service in his home state of South Australia, to name a few.' (Introduction)