AustLit

'Flying foxes coasted at dusk, heavy and low, over Parramatta Road. Everyone in Sydney apologized for the smoke, and everyone added that the fire season was only beginning. In early December, no one yet knew how bad the fires would be, but even so the stores were asking customers to "round up" their purchase sums as donations for wildlife relief. When I took the train to Katoomba, the Blue Mountains unrolled like a Chinese scroll, a few details suggesting an insubstantial world. I had not traveled to Australia for the doom, however—no need, with American production of despair at such high levels—but rather to attend "From Colony to Transnation: An ASAL Conference in Honour of Robert Dixon," at the University of Sydney, 5–6 December 2019. Robert had retired after twelve years as the Professor of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney, the fourth person to hold that flag rank since 1962, following G. A. Wilkes, Leonie Kramer, and Elizabeth Webby; the university's widely denounced decision not to appoint a successor hung in the air, part and parcel of our wider habitat degradation. All the same, the conference organized by Brigid Rooney and Peter Kirkpatrick suggested a wider world as well, a model of academic commitment, skill, and generosity. Everyone in Sydney said that too.' (Introduction)

'In September 2019, the Menil Collection, a museum located in Houston, hosted the largest exhibition of Australian Aboriginal art to visit the state of Texas. For nearly five months, visitors could contemplate—free of charge pursuant to the Menil's mission—roughly one hundred artworks on loan from the Switzerland-based Fondation Opale. The Menil's own Paul R. Davis curated the exhibition, titled "Mapa Wiya (Your Map's Not Needed)." Mapa Wiya translates as "no map" in the Pitjantjatjara language of the Central Australian desert region. That phrase is inscribed on the show's title work, a drawing by the artist Kunmanara (Mumu Mike) Williams (1952–2019), who sadly did not live to see this, the first showing of his work in a US art museum. Mapa Wiya offered visitors a wide range of contemporary Aboriginal art and hence a rich window into the Aboriginal experience.'  (Introduction)

'The YWrite project investigates the role of creative writing in prisons through a state-of-the-art prison education program designed specifically for incarcerated women and children in the Northern Territory. The workshops teach incarcerated students how to express themselves through creative writing in various forms of prison prose, graffiti art, and storytelling. Graffiti constitutes a special genre of writing that has been deployed by prisoners to reflect on their circumstance, to protest their penal incarceration, or even to transform their understanding. Because "graffiti" remains unconstrained by traditional writing conventions (of spelling, grammar, and punctuation), such writing provides a space for resistant writers or those of lower literacy levels to write intuitively. A writer of graffiti can articulate messages with a sense of urgency, uninhibited by conventional expectations of normative writing. The aims of the project are to foster motivation and self-efficacy through creativity, which in turn can lead to improved self-image and reduced emotional stress, an increase in literacy, and more postrelease opportunities. A major outcome of the program will allow detainees to share their "stories" through the publication or exhibition of their work, which will in turn contribute insights for society's understanding of effective prison arts programs and the effects of writing to transform.' (Introduction)

'Elliot Perlman's novel Maybe the Horse Will Talk is a lively, quick-paced narrative of underdogs fighting against their corporate overlords. Wrapped in the shroud of social commentary, the novel succeeds on the backs of its compelling characters and the urgency of the situation in which they find themselves.'  (Introduction)

'What do a conscientious objector, two graduate students, and a murderer have in common? A conscience. Interweaving three different narratives that span three centuries, Ian Reid's latest novel, A Thousand Tongues, embarks on a journey to understand the role of the conscience in our past and present.' (Publication abstract)