AustLit

'Last year, at a lively town hall forum at James Cook University examining the question of gender bias in Australian literature, I was asked a question which astonished me. Did I, my interlocutor asked, personally feel “doubly marginalised as a female poet,” due to poetry’s marginal status in Australian literature, and women’s marginal status as writers in general? My answer—with the caveat that I was speaking for myself—was an unequivocal no. Poetry undoubtedly occupies a peripheral position in Australian literary culture if column inches or literary festival stages are the measure of hitting the mainstream; as Ivor Indyk (2015) wrote recently in the Sydney Review of Books, “the prejudice against poetry goes deep” (para. 3) in Australia. Nevertheless, Australian poetry persists, and stubbornly flourishes. If the number of poems published annually is anything to go by, Australian poetry is positively burgeoning. Thousands of poems are published annually, alongside a Hydra-like sprouting of anthologies that shows no sign of slowing. There is a healthy stable of mostly small independent and university publishers who produce numerous individual volumes a year, alongside larger publishers such as Hachette, Scribe and Penguin and others who occasionally produce volumes by poet-novelists on their lists such as Cate Kennedy, Maxine Beneba Clarke and others. A healthy, albeit sometimes rancorous, debate about schools and modes of poetics accompanies these publications. A relatively large volume of reviews—if not, as Ben Etherington has noted, many especially critical ones—engages with these publications. From inside this maelstrom of activity, poetry hardly feels marginal.' (Introduction)

'The Olympics were in full swing when I was approached to be part of a town hall forum on gender equality in Australian literature at James Cook University. I have never watched much sport. But in July 2016 I had a three-month old baby to look after, meaning I was spending a lot of time on the couch watching daytime television; and when the Olympics are on, there’s not much other daytime television on offer.' (Introduction)

'After briefly introducing Palm Island and its history as a place of punishment for Indigenous people, this essay looks at how readers respond to three books about Palm: Thea Astley’s The Multiple Effects of Rainshadow (1996), Chloe Hooper’s The Tall Man (2008), and Cathy McLennan’s Saltwater (2016). Using reviews posted by contributors to Goodreads, I investigate the colocation of terms which recur in positive reviews, in search of a specific form of reading, described here as “absorption.” Against the publishing and broader cultural conventions which differentiate fiction from non-fiction, the evidence shows that readers who describe themselves as having become absorbed tend also to praise these books for their truth, regardless of genre. The essay proposes some points of reference for thinking about the reading experience, and concludes by briefly noting the limits of using of genre in marketing, reviewing, and studying books. The essay is built on an awareness of the radical imbalance in the distribution of literacy in the region these books depict.'   (Publication abstract)

'The creek is a threatening site for women in Barbara Baynton’s Bush Studies (1902). The female characters in her stories are routinely represented as vulnerable, drowning, or murdered at the creek, and the slippery banks and murky waters have been established by Baynton as an Australian gothic space where women (and their bodies) are denied agency. Gillian Mears and Jessie Cole are two contemporary writers who challenge Baynton’s representation of the gothic creek. The female protagonists in their most recent Australian gothic novels, Noah in Mears’ Foal’s Bread (2011) and Mema in Cole’s Deeper Water (2014), understand the creek as a subversive site that accommodates alternative female corporeal experiences. While Noah in Foal’s Bread finds body autonomy in her use of the creek as a birthing space for her firstborn child, Mema in Deeper Water experiences body empowerment in her use of the creek as a space of sexual awakening. Though the gothic creek is a fearful site for women in Baynton’s establishing Australian gothic text, Bush Studies, both Foal’s Bread and Deeper Water demonstrate that the contemporary gothic creek is able to (re)negotiated as a site of female body autonomy and empowerment.'  (Publication abstract)

'This paper offers a look back over the rise of the visibility, and the rise as a category, of Asian Australian fiction from the beginning of the 1990s, and especially in the twenty-first century, and some of the main questions that have been asked of it by its producers, and its readers, critics, commentators and the awarders of prizes. It focuses upon women writers. The trope of “border crossings”—both actual and in the mind, was central in the late-twentieth century to much feminist, Marxist, postcolonial and race-cognisant cultural commentary and critique, and the concepts of hybridity, diaspora, whiteness, the exotic, postcolonising and (gendered) cultural identities were examined and deployed. In the “paranoid nation” of the twenty-first century, there is a new orientation on the part of governments towards ideas of—if not quite an imminent Yellow Peril—a “fortress Australia,” that turns back to where they came from all boats that are not cruise liners, containerships or warships (of allies). In the sphere of cultural critique, notions of a post-multiculturality that smugly declares that anything resembling identity politics is “so twentieth-century,” are challenged by a rising creative output in Australia of diverse literary representations of and by people with Asian connections and backgrounds. The paper discusses aspects of some works by many of the most prominent of these writers. In its mediation, through similar-but-different travelling women’s eyes, of the past and present histories of different national contexts, Asian Australian fictional writing is a significant and challenging component of the “national” culture, and is continuing to extend its audiences within, and beyond Australia.' (Publication abstract)

'Through an examination of the politics of print culture that contributed to the 1740 continuation of Daniel Defoe’s 1724 Roxana, this essay brings the historical 18th century playwright, novelist, and political pamphleteer Eliza Haywood into conversation with South African novelist J.M. Coetzee’s metafictional reworking of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Roxana, Foe (1986). This essay places Haywood – whose novel The British Recluse (1722) is one of at least seven preexisting texts that make up the “pastiche” (Seager, 2009, p. 370) that constitutes the 1740 Roxana – alongside Foe’s narrator Susan Barton, a character who constitutes “a pastiche of 18th-century heroines” (Maher 39), a woman who is “doubt itself” (Coetzee 133), uncertain of who controls the truth of her narrative, yet a woman who writes back to and against the narrative established for her by her male counterparts. Susan’s story of her life as a castaway on Cruso’s island is taken from her by Foe, Coetzee’s fictionalization of Daniel Defoe, who, instead of writing her requested The Female Castaway, writes her out of the narrative that becomes Robinson Crusoe, turning her instead into the narrator of Roxana. Spivak asks, “who is the female narrator of Robinson Crusoe?” And I answer: in a somewhat playful feminist act of resurrection, Eliza Haywood'  (Publication abstract)

'This book needs to be acknowledged as a potentially challenging and polarising read on a difficult subject. It is one that has attracted positive public acclaim, and rankled some others as well. It is a book that tells some hard truths, and risks saying some unsayable things. For those who are unaware of some of the significant issues on Palm Island and in youth detention, particularly as they pertain to Indigenous youth, this book is a must-read. For those who are members of this community, the narrative may be too close to home, and the risk of these hard truths being told in ways that point the blame too squarely at those involved, without appraising the larger structural complexities and social issues that are implicated, is perhaps too high.'  (Introduction)

'Between 1956 and 1963, the British government tested seven nuclear weapons on Australian soil, along with hundreds of minor tests that contaminated the land and exposed local communities to dangerous levels of radiation. They did so largely under a veil of secrecy, and it was decades before the Australian government moved to compensate affected remote Indigenous communities. Atomic Thunder tells the story of how a legacy of nuclear testing changed the face of Australia in the aftermath of the Second World War. The book traces the history of the British A-Bomb tests at Maralinga and Monte Bello from early research into the secrets of the atom through to the repercussions Australians faced for allowing the British to act unchecked on their land. Atomic Thunder skilfully untangles the history of nuclear testing in Australia by uncovering the stories of the people who helped to develop such devastating weaponry, the people who should have been holding them to account and those who suffered due to the lack of oversight. Liz Tynan exposes the many individuals and groups who failed to stand up for the interests of Australia by holding the British government in check. Tynan's skill as a journalist is apparent in her ability to take her readers seamlessly through the different stages of the Australian nuclear tests right through to the present while uncovering the stories of the people involved.' (Introduction)

'Growing up in an Australian country town, one might think that Australian literature would be a key staple in the school syllabus. Sadly, this was not my experience, and it has been a shortcoming that I have only come to appreciate the extent of while at university. My forays into the tradition of great Australian literature constantly and pleasantly surprise me, and one recent discovery has been the work of Thea Astley. Astley was certainly a prolific novelist—having written fifteen books over the course of her career—but more importantly, she was an accomplished writer; a fact often overlooked despite her impressive collection of literary honours. Although she had been writing from the early 1960s until well into the late 1990s, my education up until now had provided me with scant opportunity to encounter this heavyweight of Australian literature. Before coming across Selected Poems, edited by Cheryl Taylor and introduced by Susan Wyndham, the name Thea Astley had sparked only the vaguest of recollections in my mind.