AustLit

'In the middle of 2018, which for me was also the mid-point in writing the biography of major Australian literary figure Dorothy Hewett, her daughters - writers Kate Lilley and Rosanna Lilley - each published a book revealing their parents’ complicity in their sexual abuse as teenagers in the 1970s. As they both acknowledge, their experiences were never secret, at least not to the people involved, not to some who knew them well from that period and not to those who know them well now. And their testimonies were already part of my research for the biography. The revelations provoked a full-blown press scandal, however, and became a key #MeToo moment in Australia, in which the betrayals of sexual liberation and second wave literary feminism have been held up for new scrutiny.'  (Publication abstract)

'In 1959, while stationed in the Trobriand Islands as a Cadet Patrol Officer, Randolph Stow drew a mud-map in the back of his diary, coloured with red and green pastel. Titled ‘Forrest River Mission from Memory,’ it shows the layout of the Mission near Wyndham in the Kimberley, complete with rivers and tributaries, place names in two languages, a scale and a compass rose. This paper suggests that the drawing balances pride in precision of representation of the space with a sense of desire in remembering it across time and from a distance. This paper considers this act of mapping and compares it to the representations of space in Stow’s novel To the Islands (1958). It discusses the manoeuvres it highlights within Stow’s creative practice, and the tension it invokes in relation to his growing consciousness of his own settler-colonial subjectivity.'  (Publication abstract)

'Nuclear phenomena have been described as ‘uncanny’ because they disrupt rationalist ways of understanding space and time, but also because they are sites for the return of a variety of cultural repressions. In this essay, I explore an Australian instance of nuclear uncanniness—the ‘black mist’ that followed the first nuclear trial at Emu Field, South Australia, in 1953—through a work of life writing by witness and Anangu woman Jessie Lennon. I find that I’m the One that Know this Country! (2000) offers an Anangu critique of the nuclear uncanny, in which the various disruptions of the nuclear age are revealed to be part and parcel of the processes of colonisation. The work of life writing itself is the means for the Aboriginal survival of the nuclear apocalypse and its associated epistemological upheaval, structured around Lennon’s authorial position as ‘the one who knows this country.’' (Publication abstract)

'Since the 1980s, Australian critical and creative writers have employed family history as an adaptive metaphor for challenging hegemonic representations of national descent. Literary and cultural critics, in particular, describe a strong connection between complex literary representations of family in self-reflective and generically hybrid novels and an increasingly inclusive national cultural imaginary. In this article, I investigate how genealogy functions as a trope for reimagining dominant models of cultural representation in Matthew Condon’s The Trout Opera (2007). Condon’s novel exhibits both a degree of self-reflexivity and generic hybridity. However, it provides a counterpoint to what critics have described as the productive potential of filial allegories of nation. In both theme and structure, Condon’s novel dramatises a transition to a multicultural order that reproduces the cultural authority of the white patriarchal order it replaces. Genealogy, in this instance, serves as a quasi-biological metanarrative to naturalise the assimilation of multiple cultural identities and experiences in a settler colonial myth of origin. I employ Edward Said’s (1983) model of filiation and affiliation to examine the thematic and generic affiliations underpinning this dialectical manoeuvre and to illuminate how the discursive effects of genealogy are mediated by the author’s subject position and the genre(s) they employ.' (Publication abstract)

'Placing McGahan’s last novel in the context of his interest in the opposition between nature and man-made constructions explored in some of his earlier works, the paper explores the epic scale of this conflict as it plays out in his last novel, The Rich Man’s House. Namely, various conventions of the epic genre are adopted and adapted to suggest the historical, global and national importance of the battle between the self-aggrandising mankind and nature on the brink of survival.'  (Publication abstract)

'In 1997, Stephen Knight described Australian crime fiction as a genre that is ‘thriving but unnoticed’ (Continent of Mystery 1). While in recent years Australian crime fiction has gained more attention amongst both academics and reviewers, it is still missing from an area of study in which I believe it demands more notice—that is, ecocritical discussions of Australian fiction. In this paper, I investigate the idea of Australian crime fiction as a largely underexplored representation of the modern environmental crisis, discussing how modern Australian crime fiction often portrays the troubling relationship between human violence and the settler-colonial decimation of Australia’s natural environments and nonhuman animals. Such a relationship indirectly alludes to the impact of a changing climate on Australian communities and ecosystems and suggests that popular genre fiction can contribute in profound ways to broader environmental considerations. With this ecocritical framework in mind, this paper analyses the representation of drought, bushfire and the nonhuman in Jane Harper’s The Dry (2016) and Chris Hammer’s Scrublands (2018), and what such texts reveal to readers about the criminal nature of anthropogenic climate change and the settler-colonial destruction of Australian habitats.'  (Publication abstract)

'This essay is an enquiry into literary subversions of the colonial myth that civilization began with recognizable forms of labour practiced under sedentary agriculture and that land rights rest with precisely those who built complex systems of farming on fixed territory year after year. It draws from my doctoral research on the intersections between Indigenous literature produced in Australia and India. In Australia, Indigenous peoples were en masse labelled as hunter-gatherers or nomads as opposed to the colonists who arrived in 1770. Historian Prathama Banerjee has noted that in India, ‘those who came to be classified as tribes in modern times were precisely communities who were not fully identifiable as sedentary cultivators, though many communities were indeed agriculturists of various sorts, and therefore could not be mobilized simply in the name of labour and productivity’ (11-12). In a revisionist mode, Bunurong, Yuin, Tasmanian historian and author Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu (2014) and Malayarayar writer Narayan’s Kocharethi (2011) challenge us to rethink concepts of land rights, ownership, wasteland vs. agricultural land, and human labour. By presenting a transnational reading of Dark Emu and Kocharethi, this essay intends to explore how land-labour relations have been imagined, valued and practiced within Indigenous literatures and how writers continue to resist colonial and (post)colonial ideas on the same.'  (Publication abstract)

'Many critics consider the pastoral ideal as key to understanding Australia’s rural development and therefore interpret regional literature as either supporting or working against that ideal. However, this approach is problematic for a farm novel centred on labour and a harsh reality. This essay introduces the georgic mode as a new interpretative framework. In a reading of John Naish’s The Cruel Field (1962), I identify georgic conventions of the harvest, seasons, labour, harsh conditions, heroism, and farming instructions. These conventions convey insights into the wet tropics bioregion of the mid-twentieth century. Regional insights arise from depictions of sugarcane, seasons, rainforest, Indigenous people, and women. I argue that sugarcane farming and Indigenous fishing align with the georgic mode. My inclusion of Indigenous fishing extends concepts of the georgic and subverts a pastoral tradition. Spatial boundaries situate the farm and sea as georgic, and rainforest as pastoral. This delineation recognises human management of country beyond the farm. This essay has repercussions for how ‘the pastoral’ is understood and positions the georgic mode as integral to interpretations of the farm novel. Along the way, I correct a lack of critical attention to the Welsh-migrant writer, John Naish, and build on Cheryl Taylor and Elizabeth Perkins’ research on North Queensland literature to revive and reshape understandings of ‘the North’.'  (Publication abstract)

'By investigating the worlds of single mother protagonists in Helen Garner’s Monkey Grip (1977) and Other People’s Children (from Honour and Other People’s Children, 1980) this essay reflects on how Australian single mothers and their lived experiences were fictionally depicted in the decade the Supporting Mothers’ Benefit was introduced by the Whitlam Labor Government (1973).¹ Much has been written about Garner’s variously-constructed collective households and the young, inner-city types who inhabited them. This essay focusses on how Garner’s single mothers negotiate the private and the political while negotiating maternal and erotic desire in the aftermath of the gains made by second-wave feminism. Contemporarily, despite these gains and the rise in and acceptability of SMC (single mothers by choice), ‘the family’ as an ideological construct, together with the predominance of phallogocentric logic continues to inhibit single mothers’ rights, equality and agency. This is one of the great contradictions of single motherhood: that while patriarchy enforces gendered and repressive values upon single mothers and their opportunities for transcendence, as a liminal, ‘in-between’ space, single motherhood presents a site for resistance and re-imagination, as well as an escape from domestic violence. I contend that in these early works Garner teases out this contradiction of constraint and freedom, similarly to how she famously examines the fault lines that exist in the ‘gap between theory and practice’ (OPC 53).'  (Publication abstract)

'A biographer’s life, Gilbert and Sullivan might have suggested, is not an easy one. D Jean Clandinin proposes that people shape their lives by stories about themselves and others, yet Paul Murray Kendall, in his The Art of Biography, also cautions that researching and writing those lived stories is like trying to make sense of an incomplete play. This paper explores some of the issues biographers face while researching and writing life stories, using as an example the writer’s current work on the life of Australian author Louis Becke, who was renowned for shaping his own life by stories, altering chronologies and events to add drama to a life story that became difficult to distinguish from his fiction. This paper also explores the nature of the personal relationship that develops between author and subject, for in writing their story, we are writing our story.'  (Publication abstract)

(Introduction)