AustLit

'In defending themselves against the ever-more aggressive encroachments of utilitarian, market-oriented, skills-based demands for cost-effective education and research, the humanities often fall back upon a claim for the intrinsic worth of some scholarly pursuits: forms of academic inquiry that are per se valuable and need no justification beyond themselves. The close reading of a poem, the detailed annotation of an ancient manuscript, the philosophical parsing of a concept, are said to be valuable per se, in and for themselves.' (Publication abstract)

'It would have started the usual way, with a squabble over who got first go at hiding and who had to count. My older brother cam would have used his age to pull rank on me, and i would have complained that it wasn’t fair because i couldn’t get away with doing the same to our younger brother. at just two and a half years of age though, Robbie would have been too little to be left in charge of counting. Too little for counting, too little for seeking, too little for anything more than jumping out and exclaiming, “found you!” as though the very object of the game were to surprise the person who’d come looking for him by finding them first.' (Publication abstract)

'During the original 2016 production of 'The Drover's Wife', her adaptation for the stage of Henry Lawson's famous short story, Leah Purcell reports that her costume designer found a quotation from Lawson that seemed the perfect summary of the shared drive powering their creative work: "It is quite time that our children were taught a little more about their country for shame's sake." This opinion, sourced rather ironically from a nationalist piece Lawson wrote for 'Republican' in April 1888 called "A Neglected History," was pinned up and presided over both rehearsal and production, and later became the epigraph of the playtext in all its subsequent editions. Purcell already knew she had her grandmother's blessing for the theatre she wanted to create, delivered in a dream during the early process of playwriting itself: "I asked her, am I doing all right? And she bowed to me. The ancestors are happy, you know?" (Purcell, 'SMH' 2016). she also recognised the positive force of Lawson's statement: "a sign that Henry's going, 'you go, girl' " (Purcell, 'The Guardian' 2017). Lawson's 1888 statement and his short story of 1892 are both profoundly renovated by intertextual repurposing in an indigenous context and by an indigenous writer.'  (Publication abstract)

'From the earliest years, and for many years thereafter, the voice accompanies him. Foreign, but familiar, it's barbed with an edge beyond which opens abysses. He knows his father was born into the shadow-lands of Europe, in the first half of 1940. He's heard that the men of the father's family fought on the other, resisting side, the good side. but there's no way of knowing the truth, of the time, of their enemy, notorious for being more unhinged than the worst of their German counterparts. Of knowing if his own family had a hand in the excesses, very distant now, still brooding in its veins. He imagines he has no part in it, born as he is into the lucky country, to the lucky migrant father, over three decades later.' (Publication abstract)

'The larger history of Australia's relationship with China over the past century includes a substantial story of cultural relations and understandings between the two countries. And central to this story is another, of scholarly exchange around literature, conducted through the medium of translation, with all the extentuation, complication and delay that attends the freighting of words, phrases and expressions across the bounds of different languages. This essay considers the development of Australian literary studies in China, as it grew from a condition of estrangement to one of comprehensive interconnectivity in this period, through the story of the translation of one book: Elizabeth Harrower's 'The Watch Tower' (1966). (Publication abstract)