AustLit

'Focusing on The Swan Book (2013) by Alexis Wright and Terra Nullius (2018) by Claire Coleman, this article demonstrates how Aboriginal science-fiction rests on a creative temporal continuum as the logical sequel to Australia’s history of colonization and its present Indigenous people’s struggle, whether it be cultural or political. Both novels claim desert and swamp should not be understood as permanent and stable or never-changing places but rather as vibrant places where new connections are woven to eventually form a global network of relationships relying on transculturalism.' (Publication abstract)

'In the 1970s, the loosening of the censorship laws and sexual mores enabled the countercultural Balmain Group to indulge in libertine literary representations which opened up new perspectives in Australian literature. Among them, let us mention freedom of sexual expressiveness, the broadening of the Australian erotic fiction repertoire, the addition of a new dimension to realism, daring depictions of alternative lifestyles and sexualities, the challenging of mainstream heteronormativity, the expression of a subversive counter-culture, the expansion of the boundaries of the Australian novel genre. These new approaches to sexuality, as evidenced by explicit sex scenes probing a wide range of sexual practices, have shaped a sexual revolution in print and a counter-cultural art of dealing with dirt (understood as licentious subject-matter) which my paper will try to conceptualise. I shall restrict my scope to material published in the 1970s by analysing the prose written by some of the Balmain Group authors such as Frank Moorhouse and Michael Wilding.' (Publication abstract)

'Paul Sharrad has established a reputation as a first-rate, archivally-oriented literary scholar, and this book adds considerably to that repute. It is a quite stunningly detailed case and career study of a major postcolonial author, Thomas Keneally, and of his hard journey as a talented young writer emerging improbably from a plebeian Sydney suburb and somehow re-inventing and sustaining himself as a professional author for fifty years, writing classics such as The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1972), a grim, bloody tale of a young Aborigine’s violent response to the experience of colonial racism, and Schindler’s Ark (1982), his remarkable study of Oskar Schindler, a German profiteer whose Cracow factory became a place of refuge for Jews set for execution under Nazism. Sharrad calls Schindler’s Ark a “not wholly fictive book […] that earned [Keneally] his greatest literary award, sales and renown” (157). This “faction” account of a tortured Catholic businessman won Keneally the 1982 Booker Prize and was developed into a Spielberg movie. Sharrad explains how Keneally can be esteemed as a serious literary figure in Australia and an entertaining, popular writer elsewhere, noting, importantly, that “Keneally’s career happens not just as a series of runs in the same event: it is a combination of novel, drama, history, screen-writing” (199). Keneally has produced highly-charged ethical narratives exploring human redemption in a series of works which has comprised thirty-five novels, two children’s books, seventeen works of non-fiction, seven plays, eleven TV, film and radio scripts, and numerous essays.' (Introduction)

'Matteo Dutto’s Legacies of Indigenous Resistance, which was recently shortlisted for the 2021 ASAL Alvie Egan Award, is a remarkable book. It is the first book that examines comparatively the legacies of three Indigenous Australian resistance leaders, Pemulwuy, Yagan, and Jandamarra, and provides close analysis of works by Indigenous Australian writers, filmmakers, performers, and communities, who have retold their stories. Pemulwuy, a Bidjigal/Eora man (from the area spreading west from what is now called Botany Bay to Salt Pan Creek) was born around 1750 and fought against the British between 1790 and 1802; a Bunuba (from the Kimberley region of Western Australia), Jandamarra was born around 1873 and killed in 1897; a Noongar (from the Perth area), Yagan was born around 1795 and killed in 1833. Interested in “the social power of storytelling” (3), Dutto, an Italian scholar, focuses on these historical figures because their stories “have produced since their death the largest corpus of incarnations across different media” (12), and “forc[e] us to acknowledge the unceded sovereignty of First Nations across Australia and to question the legitimacy of settler colonial authority” (11).' (Introduction)