AustLit

'The National Archives of Australia has already been busy telling its own story of what happened in the Palace Letters affair. Visitors to an exhibit at its Canberra East Block headquarters will learn that ‘[o]n 14 July 2020 that the National Archives of Australia released, without exemption, a collection of papers known as the “Palace Letters”’. More cryptically, it then refers to ‘a series of court challenges and appeals’.'  (Introduction)

'Coniston, written for a popular audience, is a compelling read. The prologue portrays Central Australia during the 1920s as an alien environment for settlers, who were at the mercy of marauding Aborigines. The racial violence, exacerbated by drought, is said to have exploded with the so-called ‘Warramulla invasion’ that saw Aboriginal people kill Fred Brooks on Coniston Station, then attack other white men camped along the Lander River. Subsequently, Mounted Constable George Murray was appointed to investigate these attacks, which led to a series of expeditions that resulted in the killing of numbers of Aboriginal people. These events are now referred to as ‘the Coniston massacre’. An official inquiry into the slayings resulted in the finding that Murray and his men shot thirty-one Aboriginal people in self-defence. Noting that the war of the Warramullas was ‘a figment of a fevered white imagination’ (4), the author, Michael Bradley, is interested in getting to the truth of the situation: ‘why it happened’ and ‘how many died’. He asks, furthermore, why Coniston ‘is not part of the conversation’ about ‘Australia's graphic history of war and large-scale death’ (5).' (Introduction)

'Asked what poetry could do for Australia, A.D. Hope is anecdotally reported to have replied that it could justify its existence. He likely did not intend it as such, but it is a succinct elucidation of the ineluctable connection between settler poetics and settlement, dynamically theorised by Paul Carter and Phillip Mead, among many others. This connection is evident in each of the formative moments adduced in the development of an Australian literary consciousness; from Marcus Clarke’s 1876 essay on weird melancholy to Henry Lawson’s 1892 Bush Undertaker, and Vance Palmer’s The Legend of the Nineties (1954). The structure of feeling manifested and practised in settler literature operates in an explicit or latent dialectic with Indigenous presence. Nadia Rhook’s book of poems Boots interrogates and revivifies some of the fundamental questions of this dialectic, with a direct lyricism.'  (Introduction)

'Following the death of South Australia's former long-serving premier, Don Dunstan, Gough Whitlam remarked:

'It is difficult to rekindle the brightness of the light which seemed to shine from Adelaide around Australia during the Dunstan years. The fact is that no one has done more to transform his own community and society and, by his example, the whole of Australia. (xii–xiii)