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Issue Details: First known date: 2013... 2013 Reading Australia
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Contents

* Contents derived from the Sydney, New South Wales,:Reading Australia , 2013- version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
[Essay] : The Divine Wind, Alice Pung , single work criticism

'A generation living in peacetime is inclined to devalue the identity and place of soldiers. In Australia, active soldiers have been maligned as meddlesome interlopers in foreign affairs (if they are our soldiers) or combatant terrorists (if they are not). In his book Secret Men’s Business (1998), John Marsden wrote that going to war used to be seen as a marker of adulthood. We forget that war was once how individual personality and collective character was formed. We forget that many of our compatriots came here because of war, that there are former child soldiers living in Australia, and that literature and the armed forces didn’t always occupy such opposing worlds.' (Introduction)

[Essay] : The Lost Thing, Gary Crew , single work criticism

Written and illustrated by Shaun Tan, The Lost Thing (2000) prompts readers to ask: ‘Who is this book for and what does it mean?’ Tan, in a personal email to the author, himself confesses that the work is a fable ‘about all sorts of social concerns with a rather ambiguous ending’, while the unnamed narrator of the story nonchalantly confesses: ‘don’t ask me what the moral is’. For these reasons, the reader may be forgiven for believing that the first-person narrator of The Lost Thing, represented in the illustrations as an ‘eraser headed’ young man, is possibly the author himself. But who knows, given that Shaun has declared of his work, ‘Just don’t ask the creator.’ (Introduction)

[Essay] : A Mother’s Disgrace, Kerryn Goldsworthy , single work essay

'On the day that Robert Dessaix first came face to face with his birth mother, he was already in his mid-forties. Adopted as a newborn baby in 1944 by a couple who had loved and cared for him through his childhood and adolescence, he had grown up in Sydney, had invented his own imaginary land with its own language, had been married for twelve years, divorced, negotiated a reorientation of his sexuality, and eventually met and made a life with his partner Peter. He was a seasoned, experienced traveller and a speaker of several languages. He had made his way through two successful careers, first as an academic scholar, teacher, and translator of Russian literature, and then as a well-known broadcaster on the ABC’s flagship literary program ‘Books and Writing’, to which, in the days before podcasts and digital radio, thousands of thoughtful people all over the country would listen every Sunday night.' (Introduction)

[Essay 2] : Hotel Sorrento, Kate Mulvany , single work essay

'I’m Meg, I think…

'That is…

'I’m a writer from a small Australian country town who took off as far away as possible – to as many places as possible – to live and work. And one of my pieces just happened to be a (semi) ‘autobiographical’ piece. And the characters just happened to be based on my family members – their names changed. And I had also just happened to contend with a prodding press on how my family responded, and I found myself sitting at dinner tables as those very family members discussed ‘what was true and what wasn’t’. I, like Meg, also got asked to partake in countless forums on ‘women in autobiography’ and deal with people assuming, as a female writer, that my play (legitimate, in my mind) was some form of extended ‘diary entry’, and would I ‘ever consider writing something fictional?’' (Introduction)

[Essay 1] : Hotel Sorrento, Cate Kennedy , single work essay

'Hannie Rayson’s well-loved Hotel Sorrento, which premiered onstage in 1991 and was made into a feature film in 1995, explored some immediately identifiable terrain for many audiences when it first appeared. It tapped the theme of Australian ‘cultural cringe’, the contested ownership of cultural and personal stories and conflict over entitlement and betrayal. These concerns were framed in the rocky relationships between three Australian sisters, all of who, at the play’s opening, have made widely different paths for themselves in the world.' (Introduction)

[Essay] Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines, Billy Griffiths , single work essay

'David Unaipon’s Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines is part of the classical culture of Australia. The collection is as varied in subject as it is ambitious in scope, ranging from ethnographic essays on sport, hunting, fishing and witchcraft to the legends of ancestral beings who transformed the landscape in the Dreaming. The stories are unified by the voice of Unaipon, Australia’s first Indigenous author, whose familiar face now adorns the fifty dollar note.' (Introduction)

[Essay] : The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Kerryn Goldsworthy , single work essay

'When Richard Flanagan won the 2014 Man Booker Prize for his sixth novel, The Narrow Road to the Deep North, it was not the first time that he had won an international fiction prize; his third novel, Gould’s Book of Fish (2001), won the Commonwealth Writers Prize in 2002. Nor was it the first time that one of his novels had caused deep division among readers and critics; the influential Australian critic and reviewer Peter Craven had savaged Gould’s Book of Fish in a review for The Age. But that novel had also been Flanagan’s most successful until his Booker win, garnering two major national awards as well the Commonwealth Writers Prize.' (Introduction)

[Essay] : The Pea-pickers, Lucy Treep , single work essay

'Eve Langley’s first novel, The Pea-pickers (1942), has surprised and delighted readers since it was written. Douglas Stewart praised it as ‘the most original contribution to Australian literature since Tom Collins wrote Such is Life’ (31), and Norman Lindsay described it as ‘a book that will live’ (2). Before publication the manuscript shared the Bulletin’s S. H. Prior Memorial Prize in 1940, with The Battlers by Kylie Tenant and the ‘John Murtagh Macrossan lectures’ by Malcolm Henry Ellis. On reading the manuscript Frank Dalby Davison wrote, ‘It has the dew on it … It contributes something fresh to Australian literature. It is rare. I think it will be cherished’ (2). The predictions of Davison and his colleagues have proven to be accurate: twenty-first century readers still find this engaging novel ‘fresh’ and ‘original’, and enjoy the protagonist’s theatrical flouting of social conventions. Langley skilfully weaves together many strands in her vibrant text, and perhaps most successful is the humour that frequently pervades the narrative. This humour is often at the expense of the narrator, though rapid shifts in perspective and the wit and vigour of her voice urge the reader to laugh with Steve at the same time as we laugh at her.' (Introduction)

[Essay] : New and Selected Poems : Gig Ryan, Corey Wakeling , single work essay

'Gig Ryan (1956–) in my view represents what might become of Australian poetry more so than what has come before, living uneasily in any given cultural, philosophical, or aesthetic tradition. This is work projected towards the future from within modern anxiety. Ryan has lived most of her life in Melbourne, but has also lived in Sydney. She belongs to a minority of living Australian poets published outside of Australia in book form by an active publisher1. The poetic interest of her work lies in its living simultaneously inside and outside the established ways we have of constructing history, especially literary history, along with the poetry’s vivid construction of subjectivity in late modernity using the medium of transhistorical characters from the Western political imaginary, such as Antigone. Hence this work is also unsettled in a monocultural Australian national paradigm, selective with cultural history and legacy outside of the codes of tradition, and incredulous of patriarchy. This introduction to Gig Ryan’s New and Selected Poems (2011) and broader work will bring contrary critical discourses into a syncretic theory of Ryan’s ambiguous political imaginary using a discussion of anxiety and Antigone, in particular, to introduce and explain shifts in the oeuvre’s consciousness of political subjectivity across six books and roughly thirty years of publication, from The Division of Anger (1980) to Heroic Money (2001), to poems from the present (2015), in general.' (Introduction)

[Essay] : The Removalists, James McNamara , single work essay

'David Williamson is our most distinguished dramatist. His plays have been performed to acclaim in Australia and internationally. His screenplays, notably Gallipoli (1981), define a certain Australian mythos. Williamson is considered an establishment playwright, depicting middle-class fears and foibles in major theatres. But he came to prominence in a different forum, with a play anything but mainstream. The Removalists, first performed in 1971, is violent, funny, and disturbing. It centres on two policemen, Ross and Simmonds. After receiving a domestic violence complaint from Fiona, they help her to move out and end up beating her husband Kenny to death.' (Introduction)

[Essay] : Dimboola, Judith Rodriguez , single work essay

'Dimboola‘s title is a great start to the play that was first performed in 1969. It belongs nowhere but in Australia. At the same time, not many people can claim to have lived there or to know someone from Dimboola. Indigenous? Maybe. And where is Dimboola? You drive through it on your way to somewhere else. It’s in Victoria, out where all the roads are signposted ‘so many km to Melbourne’.' (Introduction)

[Essay] : Nine Parts of Desire, Randa Abdel-Fattah , single work essay

‘The daily life of Muslim women.’ ‘An understanding of the women behind the veils.’ ‘A compelling insight into women in the Muslim world.’ This is what the blurb of Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women promises the reader.' (Introduction)

[Essay] : Nine Parts of Desire 2, Christopher Kremmer , single work essay

'Like the biblical story of Christ’s birth, Geraldine Brooks’ Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women begins with a woman refused a room at an inn. In Brooks’ tale, the ‘inn’ is a modern hotel in the Saudi Arabian city of Dhahran in the early 1990s, where the Australian journalist is on assignment for the Wall Street Journal. She is refused a room not because she is pregnant – she isn’t – nor because the hotel is fully booked; rather, it is contrary to the laws of the desert kingdom for a woman to travel without her husband. Only a prostitute would do so, as the male receptionist implies. When the affronted traveller tries to bed down on a sofa behind a plant in the lobby, the police are called.' (Introduction)

[Essay] : Carpentaria, Meera Anne Atkinson , single work essay

'I first read the fiction of Alexis Wright when I was writing a thesis on transgenerational trauma for my doctorate at Western Sydney University. I was exploring the ways in which literature testifies to transmissions of psychic trauma, which, in Unclaimed Experience (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), Cathy Caruth defines as the impact of an unassimilated event or experience that makes its presence known belatedly and often illogically. In Carpentaria, Wright’s second novel, I found a prime example of such testimony: a fierce epic that both honours Indigenous sovereignty and culture and attests to the ravages wrought by colonisation.' (Introduction)

[Essay] : Murray: Collected Poems, Felicity Plunkett , single work essay

'Edward Hirsch begins his beautiful How to Read a Poem (Harcourt Brace, 1999) in Celan’s heartland. Imagine yourself on the shore, he writes, foraging among ‘seaweed and rotten wood, the crushed cans and dead fish’, finding an ‘unlikely looking bottle from the past’. The message inside has been making its way towards someone for a long time, and now ‘that someone turns out to be you’. He quotes ‘On the Interlocutor’, Osip Mandelstam’s 1913 essay about a similar wave-dumped poem: ‘The message in the bottle was addressed to its finder. I found it. That means, I have become its secret addressee.’ Poems, for Mandelstam, are composed for ‘a reader in posterity’; for Celan, perhaps for a reader he refers to as the ‘addressable thou’.' (Introduction)

[Essay] : Café Scheherazade, Angelo Loukakis , single work essay
[Essay] : Speaking in Tongues, Melissa Reeves , single work essay

'I have worked quite a bit with Andrew Bovell. We have collaborated on two (and a half) plays, and a movie, in a group of writers/theatre makers called Six. The four playwrights of the group, the other two being Patricia Cornelius and Christos Tsiolkas, have all learned much from each other. It is a privilege to see another writer’s process up extremely close, from the first seed of an idea to the final performance draft. You get to see how they manage the art of filtering the real world and the world of ideas, and shared avowed intentions into stories, characters, images—theatre. We all came into the group as experienced writers with our own voices, but when working with others who do what you do you can’t help comparing and contrasting; you admire, envy, and sometimes even pinch stuff, albeit unconsciously. I want a bit of that, you think. I want Patricia’s easy, lyrical, colloquial poetry. I want Christos’ morally confounding collisions between characters and ideas.' (Introduction)

[Essay 1] : The Chapel Perilous, Noëlle Janaczewska , single work essay

'Dorothy Hewett belongs to a long line of women who spoke out of turn.

'So does Sally Banner.

'Dorothy Hewett blazed a trail for women writers, and for Australian playwrights (of all genders) interested in theatrical innovation.

'I like to think that I’m part of that lineage.' (Introduction)

[Essay 1] : Away, Judith Rodriguez , single work essay

'‘Away’, as a title, gives little away. It’s a common word that’s packed in a lot of meanings and feelings over centuries of use. To be ‘not here’ offers endless possibilities – some delightful, like a holiday, escaping something unpleasant, or exploring new experiences. ‘Away you go!’ suggests that what happens next will be exciting, different – a fast ride, a plunge into sea or space.' (Introduction)

[Essay 2] : Away, Hilary Bell , single work essay

'When Away premiered at Griffin Theatre in January 1986 I was nineteen and just embarking on a career as a playwright. I’d been part of the inaugural Interplay Young Playwrights’ Festival six months earlier, and had recently begun my first theatre job as Shopfront Theatre’s playwright-in-residence.' (Introduction)

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