AustLit

'During the interwar years, Australians grew increasingly anxious about their sparsely populated north. They had moral qualms about leaving land idle; they felt uneasy about international criticism of their lacklustre efforts in the tropics; they feared a stronger, more resolute nation might rob them of their under-utilised heritage. While anxieties intensified, there was an efflorescence of travel writing on northern Australia, as cars and aeroplanes made this part of the continent a little more accessible. Like other travel writers, those on northern Australia in the interwar years did not confine their narratives to what they did and what they saw. They commented on the burning questions of the day: on what the future of the north might hold and whether Australia’s northern lands could sustain a prolific white population. This article explores a range of representations of northern Australia in the travel literature published between the two world wars, with particular attention to the varied assessments of Australia’s tropical environments and the racial misgivings that disconcerted attempts to envisage an all-white north.'  (Publication abstract)

'The expectation that a novel about a celebrity aviator will romanticise flight and glorify the pilot is a product of the mythologisation of aviation, which this essay understands is a response to the threat of technology and the alienating conditions of modernity. Roger McDonald’s novel Slipstream refuses to reproduce this mythology, expressing a literary aspiration to use the form of the modern novel to explore the entanglement of the subject under the conditions of postcolonial modernity. My argument will develop through three parts. The first section will explore the mythologisation of aviation as a symptom of modernity. The second will examine the ways in which the novel uses its modernist form to call into question the celebrity of the aviator and the spectacle of flight. This part of my argument is indebted to the critique by German philosopher Martin Heidegger of the technological mode of Being. Finally, I take up the postcolonial implications of the Heideggerian critique in a country in which many of modernism’s standard antidotes to the problems of its century are compromised by the legacies of colonialism.' (Publication abstract)

'Non-fiction books by and about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders have arguably played a crucial role in the framing of public discussion of Indigenous issues in Australia since the 1950s. In this article, I track quantitative trends in the publishing of the approximately 769 such books for the Australian retail trade between 1960 and 2000, as part of what I describe as an emerging “cultural mission” among Australian book publishers through the period. The article then discusses two major trends within the data. The first is an overall increase in the number of titles published annually through the period, while the second is a declining interest by mass-market trade publishers in publishing books in the area from the 1980s onwards versus an increased publication rate by smaller independent presses and two large trade publishers with a particular interest in the area, one of which is also independently owned. The article concludes with a discussion of possible reasons for the latter trend in the context of ongoing debates about white Australian colonialism.'  (Publication abstract)

'This article considers the significance of gay men’s personal accounts of living with HIV or AIDS that were published in the gay press across the 1980s. Editors utilised individuals’ accounts of living with the illness to challenge mainstream media representations of gay men’s physical and emotional demise in the “final stages” of the debilitating illness. Such accounts conveyed the message that it was possible to resume one’s life after receiving a positive diagnosis. Gay men’s personal accounts of living with HIV or AIDS evolved from anonymous anecdotes to articles accompanied by the narrator’s full name and photograph by the end of the decade. This shift is attributed to Australia’s Third National AIDS Conference in 1988, whereby people with HIV and AIDS publicly disclosed their positive statuses. This article locates gay men’s personal accounts of living with HIV in a broader transnational shift towards the visibility of people with HIV and AIDS that was underway at that time.' (Publication abstract)

'Settler colonialism produces distinctive structures, spaces and boundaries that seek to differentiate coloniser from colonised, black from white. Two works that explore these cultural spaces, social structures, racial hierarchies—and the intimate and actual lived-in spaces that lay in-between—are Fiona Davis’ Australian Settler Colonialism and the Cummeragunja Aboriginal Station: Redrawing Boundaries and Fiona Probyn-Rapsey’s Made to Matter: White Fathers, Stolen Generations. Both works engage with theories of whiteness, foregrounding it as a necessary concept to grapple with the different racial, cultural and social spaces produced by settler colonialism in Australia, yet they do so from different “fields” or “sites”.' (Introduction)

'Charles Edwin Woodrow Bean, generally known as CEW Bean, trained as a lawyer and practised as a journalist prior to the First World War. Appointed Official Correspondent in 1914, he subsequently became editor of the Official History of Australia in the War of 1914–1918, writing the key volumes about Anzac and the Western Front himself. Bean was the founding father of the Australian War Memorial, and if that was not enough, also played a role in establishing the National Archives. Largely unread now—he may never have been read much—Bean is widely regarded as the creator, or the most significant founder, of the Anzac legend.' (Introduction)