AustLit

'Many years ago I read a now forgotten novel by a now forgotten author, which had a truly wonderful preface. It read, simply, this bloody book nearly killed me. I therefore dedicate it, dear Reader, to myself. There is a delicate irony at play, I think, in my long remembering this dedication while the book itself is erased completely from my memory. I’ll touch on the interplay of knowledge and memory in due course. What I want to start by saying, though, is that in my case, as in the case of that forgotten preface’s author, while writing can be a horrifically stressful business - and while writing this paper did indeed feel like it was going to kill me - the Author is emphatically Not Dead.' (Introduction)

'As scholars, critics, reviewers and students of Australian literature, what are our values and our impact? Does what we research and write make any difference, make anything happen, anywhere? That is what the funders of our discipline are asking, but also what we need to ask of ourselves. This is not going to be a self-aggrandizing article, nor a nihilistic, hands-thrownup kind of essay—Whence the Humanities? Whence Literary Studies? Whence literature?— although there may be something of that along the way. The most recent, 2018 round of Australian Research Council (ARC) grants is one arguably gloomy indicator that Literary Studies and its sister disciplines of Cultural Studies and Creative Writing are not doing well, and not being seen, in the national fields of research. Of course Literary Studies may have migrated into interdisciplinary locations, and is in now ‘in competition’ with other language disciplines, so is it becoming almost invisible on ARC platforms? This paper, generously given the mantle of the 2016 Dorothy Green Lecture in its first iteration, explores authority and the making of meaning in Literary Studies as interlocking questions. However, for many within the discipline and beyond, even the notion of meaning is under fire. This paper will defend the categories of value and of meaning-making in the Humanities, and ask where Literary Studies might be going.' (Introduction)

'I should confess up front: I did not deliver the paper I intended at the 2016 Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference convened in July in Canberra. At least not that exact paper. Months earlier, when I received the invitation to present a keynote, I had imagined the possibilities for engaging ASAL members as a particular kind of informed audience—one able to recognise, for instance, that in the Australian context the English-language term ‘Dreaming’ evokes Aboriginal understandings not only of the distant past of creation but also of the considerable force of creator ancestors continuing into the present and future. I thus immediately thought to address the intersections of Indigenous activism and publishing, two modes of contemporary Indigenous creation, both within and outside Australia, and to focus that address specifically around the significance of 1964. 1 That year has been much on my mind, and my original idea was to juxtapose the historic 1964 publication of the first book of poems written by an Indigenous author in Australia, We Are Going by Oodgeroo Noonuccal, then known as Kath Walker, with the 1964 publication of the first book of poems written by a Maori author in Aotearoa New Zealand, No Ordinary Sun by Hone Tuwhare, and the 1964 publication of the first book of poems written by a contemporary Native American author in the United States, Raising the Moon Vines: Original Haiku in English by Gerald Vizenor (although Vizenor had privately published an earlier volume of haiku in 1962). 2 The serendipity of synchronous first publications of books of poems by diverse Indigenous writers situated within the confines and possibilities of different English-speaking settler nation-states would help me demonstrate a version of literary contextualisation, analysis, and appreciation I have been calling trans-Indigenous. 3 The term is meant to be expansive; here it is deployed in the sense of a critical practice of purposeful juxtaposition, of reading across, beyond, and through specifically located Indigenous literatures, histories, and cultures.' (Introduction)

'In 2001 I travelled to south-west Western Australia to research my first novel, the springboard for which was nineteenth-century botanist Georgiana Molloy who had emigrated from England to Augusta with her husband John Molloy in 1829. My friend and I pulled up at Wonnerup House, the homestead of the Laymans, who had lived with the Molloys at Augusta before moving to Wonnerup. We wandered through cold, square rooms, then out into the sunshine. This was the place, a small placard read, where George Layman was speared by Gayware, a Wardandi Nyungar. Our reconnaissance complete, we sat on the grass before the house, unpacked some baguettes and smeared them with cheese. We were impervious to the violence that once arose from those smooth, glossy lawns.' (Introduction)

'This paper traverses an array of theories and disciplines bearing on the representation and interpretation of Aboriginal people within the narratives of colonial Modernity and the institutions of Western scholarship descended from these narratives. While these discourses occupy contiguous spaces, their fault-lines articulate ongoing contradictions within Australian cultural discourse, and between that discourse and its material conditions. The rise of Aboriginal Literature, as such, and of global Indigenous Studies, has further illuminated the inability of classical textual analysis to describe certain forms of difference. This deficiency was demonstrated by the post-structural turn, but not, it seems, substantively understood or implemented, and present conditions demand a more urgent reconfiguration of the assumed relationships between writing, interpretation and culture.' (Introduction)

'In Eleanor Dark’s novel Waterway (1938), Professor Channon is prompted by the ominous international headline ‘Failure of Peace Talks’ to imagine the world from a global perspective (120). Channon feels himself metaphorically ‘lifted away from the earth … seeing it from an incredible distance, and with an incredible, an all-embracing comprehension’ (119-20). This move outward from a located perspective to ‘a more detached overview of a wider global space’ signifies a cosmopolitan viewpoint, ‘in which the viewing subject rises above the placebound attachments of the nation-state to take the measure of the world as a wider totality’ (Hegglund 8-9). Yet even this global view is mediated by Channon’s position from within ‘a great island continent alone in its south sea’ (121). Gazing from a ‘vast distance,’ he views Europe as ‘the patches where parasitic man had lived longest and most densely,’ and from which humankind ‘went out to infect fresh lands’ (120). This description of old world Europe as ‘parasitic’ provides a glimpse of resistant nationalism, reflecting Channon’s location within one of the ‘fresh lands’ affected by colonisation. Channon is ultimately unable to sustain a ‘Godlike’ perspective in this scene, desiring ‘nothing but to return’ to local place (121). Although his view initially ‘vaults beyond the bounds of national affiliation’ (Alexander and Moran 4), this move outward does not ‘nullify an affective attachment to the more grounded locations of human attachment’ (Hegglund 20). Channon’s return to the ‘shabby home … of his own humanity’ brings a renewed sense of connection to ‘the sun-warmed rail of the gate’ and ‘the faint breeze [which] ruffled the hair back from his forehead’ (122).' (Introduction)

'This paper investigates the affective labour done by, specifically, native species images in Australian poetry, using Judith Wright's bird poems, and various poems about kangaroos as example. It uses the anthropological term, "deep hanging out", borrowed from an article about fashion models, to extend the idea of affective labour, and to measure poems' attentions to birds and animals, and their relation to iconising as the work of nationalism. It is concerned with cultural capital, and Canberra, and the human empire.'  (Publication abstract)

'Aboriginal Australian and African American poets of the Civil Rights movements of the 1960s and beyond were prominent in the connected struggles of their peoples. The poetry of some of these poets displays common elements that enable a comparative reading of their work. This essay traces the influence of poets from the African American Black Arts movement on the work of Aboriginal Australian poet Lionel Fogarty (born 1958). It proposes that the radical poetic structures of Fogarty’s poems share common features with those of African American poets such as Everett LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka) (1934-2014) and Sonia Sanchez (born 1934). The explicitly militant tone in many of these poems can also be linked to the ideas of Malcolm Little (later Malcolm X). The essay examines the role of poetry in the political struggle of Aboriginal and African American communities and addresses issues of literary sovereignty by placing Aboriginal poetry within a transitional discourse concerning the struggle for civil rights.'  (Publication abstract)

'In the opening scene of Eleanor Dark’s novel Waterway (1938), Oliver Denning drives over Sydney’s South Head through the dawn, looking out over the red roofs of Watsons Bay to the harbour below. Oliver’s elevated perspective and physical distance allow him to offer readers a holistic assessment of Sydney, one hundred and fifty years after white settlement. As a doctor, Oliver relies on medical metaphors for his description, diagnosing the city as a germinating disease, ‘the growth of whose parent cells had fastened upon the land’ in 1788 (11). Struggling to reconcile with its cost—a land ‘violated,’ a people decimated—Denning finds himself wishing to ‘annihilate the city’ (12, 11). As the scene continues, however, the doctor forces himself to reconfirm his connection to the present place and time, as Dark shifts to second person to enfold the reader in a vision of radical community:

You were one of the red roofs, and all about you, on this shore and on the opposite shore, from Balgowah to Parramatta, were your neighbours, the other red roofs … He was very well pleased that it should be so. … What you see now, spreading itself over the foreshores, reaching back far out of sight, and still back into the very heart of the land, is something in whose ultimate good you must believe or perish. The red roofs and the quiet grey city become intimate and precious—part of a story of which you yourself are another part, and whose ending neither you nor they will see. (12-13)