AustLit

'This special issue showcases the diverse ways in which Australian literature and place-making are brought together in contemporary literary scholarship. The seven essays, as well as the creative work by artist and scholar Ross Gibson, illuminate place as intimately constituted by narrative practice, and reflexively, show how geographies and environments inform literary forms, modes and, to use Jennifer Hamilton’s productive term, ‘tones.’ Poetics and placemaking are closely bound. This is of particular consequence in our national context, where ongoing cultures of colonisation, and the political potential of decolonising practices, are both enabled by the kinds of stories we tell both about and through our occupation of place. Storytelling is never neutral, nor is it dematerial. It is always, profoundly, active and has effects on the composition of the world; it is also collaborative, and not always with other human actors. Thinking about a potentially decolonised place requires an interrogation of what enables the enduring capacity of space to exclude and dispossess. It means understanding how words ‘do’ work. The essays included here understand this work in a range of ways and through distinct frames.' (1)