AustLit
Latest Issues
AbstractHistoryArchive Description
Contents
-
“Where We Are Is Too Hard” : Refugee Writing and the Australian Border as Literary Interface,
single work
criticism
'Over the past decade Australia’s policies on border protection have achieved a certain dark notoriety, in their often-vexed (although perhaps not vexed enough) reception both at home and abroad. While there has been extensive, if not necessarily efficacious, public debate about the legal and political dimensions of these policies, together with some coverage of their human, most often medical, consequences for refugees and asylum-seekers, there has been less opportunity for us to attend more closely to the statements and self-expression of those who have been caught up most directly and intensely in those policies.
'Testimonial accounts by detainees from Australian offshore centres are now beginning to be published and made available to the wider Australian public, as in the 2017 publication, They Cannot Take the Sky: Stories From Detention, (ed Michael Green, André Dao et al) along with manifestos, such as that by Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish journalist, currently held on Manus, who has been detained since 2013. In addition to these, in 2017, Island magazine published “Chanting of Crickets, Ceremonies of Cruelty: A Mythic Topography of Manus Prison,” an extract from Boochani’s forthcoming book, No Friend But The Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison, described by the publishers as “a lyric first-hand account” of his experiences.
'These works – testimonials, manifesto, poetic novel/memoir – don’t simply provide an account of the lives and experiences of the refugees and asylum seekers; they also delineate a relationship with the Australian public. They imagine or posit a dialogue with us. In this paper, I want to propose that we approach the dialogue being proposed by the asylum-seeker writings as a mode of literary engagement. To put this another way, I’m proposing that these works demand attentive reading from us, not only in our responsibilities as citizens but also and most particularly as literary readers or scholars. In thinking about literary reading as a point of necessary public interface, I am responding to line of thought proposed by Boochani in his resonant account of the task of writing the truth of refugee detainment in his essay in They Cannot Take the Sky, where he argues that literary language is fundamental to the expression of difficult truths: “I publish a lot of stories in the newspapers and in the media about Manus, but people, really, they cannot understand our condition, not in journalistic language. Where we are is too hard. I think only in literary language can people understand our life and our condition.”' (Publication abstract)
-
Tim Winton’s The Shepherd’s Hut : A Post-Pastoral Vision of Nature,
single work
criticism
'Critical literature concerning Tim Winton’s male protagonists is divided. Whilst various critics ultimately celebrate Winton’s men and their sacred communion with nature (McCredden, Ashcroft, Birns), others critique such characters as embodiments of brute androcentrism (Schürholz, Knox). But there is room to read Winton’s representations of masculinity more fluidly, particularly if we account for the strong environmentalist thread in his fiction. In his most recent novel The Shepherd’s Hut (2018), damaged and bung-eyed teenager Jaxie Claxton traverses the Western Australian interior and grapples with the traumatic influence of his abusive father. Jaxie’s engagement with nature is complex and often contradictory – he constantly oscillates between aggressive hostility and a more enlightened biocentric humility. Whilst aware of the novel’s overt engagement with patriarchal violence and toxic masculinity, this paper seeks to explore these complex environmental nuances – most significantly, Jaxie’s revision of pastoral anthropocentrism. ' (Publication abstract)
-
The Making of ‘a Poet of Adelaide’ : Charles Jury and Literary Adelaide, 1893-1919,
single work
criticism
'Charles Jury was a prominent figure in Adelaide’s literary world in the middle of the twentieth century but his ideas about poetry were established by the time he was a young adult.
'This paper looks at how Jury might have been a poet ‘of Adelaide’ in the sense of being shaped by the literary culture and institutions of the city in which he grew up. It draws on archival and other sources to bring to light some aspects of Jury’s personal life and early literary career that have not yet been revealed in public.' (Publication abstract)
-
Reading Helen Koukoutsis : Cicada Chimes,
single work
criticism
'In her collection of poems Cicada Chimes, Helen Koukoutsis, an Australian poet of Greek Orthodox heritage explores the conflicting emotions produced by death and loss. The collection begins with her father’s funeral and ends with a dramatic manifesto that shows grief’s expressive power. The questions that frame this reading of Cicada Chimes are: how does this modern Australian poet utilise cultural and religious traditions for elegy? What type of spirituality does Koukoutsis identify with? And how does her work both draw on, and critically distance itself from traditional Greek rituals of lament? I will argue that Koukoutsis’ speaker positions herself both inside and outside her Orthodox faith tradition. Her inherited Eastern Mediterranean beliefs and customs are a source of consolation for her, but they are also sites of alienation and oppression. This collection of poems negotiates this contradictory relationship to tradition.' (Publication abstract)
-
‘That Old Man Making Fun of Me’ : Humour in the Writings of Aboriginal and Asian Relationships,
single work
criticism
'This article explores the role of humour in three contemporary Aboriginal texts that document Aboriginal–Asian relationships. Humour in Aboriginal texts has mostly been studied with reference to the ostensible binaries between Aboriginal and European, Black and White, colonised and colonisers. Scant critical attention has been paid to the place of humour in revealing and concealing the dynamic interrelations between Aboriginal people and Asian immigrants living under a colonial regime. This article investigates humour as a textual device that transmits subversive ideas contesting stigma and stereotypes of Aboriginal and Asian peoples regarding their identities, bodies, and inter-racial intimacies. Through close readings of Alexis Wright’s novel Plains of Promise (1997), Tex and Nelly Camfoo’s autobiography Love against the Law (2000) and Anita Heiss’s historical romance Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms (2016), this article considers three specific modes of humour in Aboriginal texts: self-deprecation, puns/wit, and boasting. The article contends that these different forms of humour draw attention to a range of unsettling issues and power relations concerning oppression and resistance, stigmatisation and normalisation, institutional control and surveillance. Further in each of these texts humour works to deconstruct images of discrete and maligned racialised otherness.' (Publication abstract)
-
Deborah Jordan, Ed., Loving Words: Love Letters of Nettie and Vance Palmer 1909–1914,
single work
review
— Review of Loving Words : Letters of Nettie and Vance Palmer, 1909 - 1914 2017 single work correspondence ;'Deborah Jordan has edited the early letters between Nettie Higgins (1885–1964) and Vance Palmer (1885–1959) into a fascinating longitudinal study of blossoming love. Born in Melbourne and Brisbane respectively, the Palmers played a formative role in the literary culture of a newly federated Australia. Both were key voices in cultural criticism. They wrote journalism, biographies, reviews, literature, and featured on radio programs. Jordan discovered the courtship letters—all 350, 000 loving words of them—as a postgraduate student in the 1970s amidst the National Library of Australia’s collections. Published in 2018, this book is clearly a project that, in a fitting mirror of the love letters themselves, reflects both the first hook of fascination and the slow burn of a deep commitment.' (Introduction) -
Tony Hughes-d’Aeth, Like Nothing on This Earth: A Literary History of the Wheatbelt,
single work
review
— Review of Like Nothing on This Earth : A Literary History of the Wheatbelt 2017 multi chapter work criticism ;'Tony Hughes-d’Aeth’s Like Nothing on this Earth begins by telling of how his interest in the Western Australian wheatbelt grew out of watching weather reports on TV. He became transfixed by the satellite image of the sharp line that rings Perth, to the north and east, stretching roughly from Geraldton to Esperance and marking out an area most Western Australians know as the wheatbelt.' (Introduction) -
David Carter and Roger Osborne, Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace 1840s–1940s,
single work
review
— Review of Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace : 1840s-1940s 2018 multi chapter work criticism biography ;'Despite its prosaic title, David Carter and Roger Osborne’s book delivers on its promise of an erudite, expansive, and engaging study of the fortunes of Australian books and authors in the American marketplace in the years spanning the 1840s to 1940s. Not simply a significant contribution to the history of Australian fiction and publishing, Carter and Osborne’s volume explores the commercial dynamics, opportunities and hurdles for Australian writers and publishing houses that sought to break into what was from the end of the nineteenth century the most lucrative publishing market in the world. Henry Lamond’s remark in 1945 was probably true for much of the period examined in this book: ‘The Yank literary market is absolutely the best in the whole blinkin’ world.’ And Carter and Osborne provide rich detail of the efforts of Australians to exploit that marketplace. More than this, Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace 1840s–1940s examines the world of colonial and transatlantic publishing and the complex of networks, institutions, and dispositions that Australia authors and books were required to negotiate.' (Introduction) -
Reg Dodd and Malcolm McKinnon, Talking Sideways: Stories and Conversations from Finniss Springs,
single work
review
— Review of Talking Sideways : Stories and Conversations from Finniss Springs 2019 single work autobiography ;'Talking Sideways was composed from conversations which unfolded over several years between Abrunna elder Reg Dodd, and artist and writer Malcolm McKinnon, on Dodd’s ancestral land on Lake Eyre in South Australia. Told episodically in alternating voices, it is about this land, Finniss Springs, and its complex, turbulent history. Familiar episodes of white incursions into Aboriginal country—explorers, anthropologists, missionaries, pastoralists, miners, land battles, grog and associated violence—entwine with exceptions and twists particular to this place and its people. Most notable among these exceptions are Dodd’s grandparents, his Abrunna grandmother Nora Beralda, ‘a proper tribal woman,’ and Scottish pastoralist grandfather, Francis Dunbar Warren, who went to Finniss Springs in 1918. Their long and strong marriage created there for a time a rare and respectful exchange between the traditional owners and newcomers to this land. It is also an intricate mapping of this land by a traditional owner versed in its character and law, and a whitefella seduced by its beauty and its ways which have drawn him back for three decades.' (Introduction) -
Jessica Gildersleeve, Christos Tsiolkas : The Utopian Vision,
single work
review
— Review of Christos Tsiolkas : The Utopian Vision 2017 multi chapter work criticism ;'I have always read Christos Tsiolkas as a writer whose grand vision is of the failure of all political utopias. In particular, I have considered Tsiolkas in relation to the anti-social strand of queer theory and the perceived failure of queer politics. However, in Jessica Gildersleeve’s Christos Tsiolkas: The Utopian Vision, she positions his body of work as offering a politics of hope through negative affect. In this way, her focus is not descriptive but is engaged with asking larger political questions about writers, readers and reading. Gildersleeve uses deconstructive and psychoanalytic strategies to reveal the ethical and affective capacities of Tsiolkas’s work. She reads Tsiolkas in relation to the social and ethical capacity of literature to produce a reader who is a ‘responsible, ethical, affective, and effective citizen’ (4). Using Sara Ahmed’s critique of happiness as an emotion that is used to cover over oppression, Gildersleeve positions negative affect as a form of resistance to normativity and positions it as a textual strategy that can elicit political change. This is particularly pertinent in relation to migrant or refugee narratives, like the ones that appear throughout Tsiolkas’s work, where there is a perceived duty of happiness and gratitude. It is also central to Tsiolkas’s positioning as an Australian writer and his unrelenting critique of the ‘lucky country.’ (Introduction) -
Mudrooroo, Tripping with Jenny,
single work
review
— Review of Tripping with Jenny 2019 single work autobiography ;'Back when Mudrooroo was Colin Johnson, he was hanging out in jazz dives in Melbourne being hip and earning royalties from Wild Cat Falling. He married Jenny Katinas, who migrated as a child from Latvia, and with two other Euro-Australians they hit the road to Asia. In his last years, after many more books and much scandal, the writer recalls his youthful journeys with ‘his first wife,’ in the process revealing something of the sense of self that underpinned all his later work.' (Introduction) -
Anne Pender, Seven Big Australians: Adventures with Comic Actors,
single work
review
— Review of Seven Big Australians : Adventures with Comic Actors 2019 multi chapter work biography ;'Seven Big Australians: Adventures with Comic Actors looks at the childhoods and careers of the pioneers of classic Australian comedy—Carol Raye, Barry Humphries, Noeline Brown, Max Gillies, John Clarke, Tony Sheldon, and Denise Scott. Each actor in this book, Pender explains, helped define the classic understanding of Aussie humour. Looking at Anne Pender’s previous work, she has extensive experience in interviewing personalities for biographies, and in particular, a complete biography of Barry Humphries (One Man Show: The Stages of Barry Humphries, 2010). (Introduction)
