AustLit

'Like many mid-century authors, Sumner Locke-Elliott fled Australia for more welcoming shores. From his first novel Careful He Might Hear You (1963), Locke-Elliott laid the foundations for a fictional self-authorship that suffused his writing with biographic detail and themes of origin, place and time. Despite his long absence from Australia and his naturalisation as an American citizen, his final novel and fictional coming out in Fairyland (1990) returns readers to the homophobic Sydney of his childhood. This blurring of biographic and fictional detail within the representational space of childhood creates an embodied literary network that connects Australia of the 1930s & 1940s and New York of the 1980s & 1990s, merging literary corpus and authorial life. Taking up this sense of presence, absence and connection, I argue that Locke-Elliot’s representation of childhood is a nostalgic point of interface that generatively refigures his oeuvre as an embodied queer and transnational literary network.' (Publication abstract)

'Though made as a flippant and provocative remark, Papastergiardis’s statement evokes another made by Patrick White himself. Invited by the democratic Greek Government to give a speech as part of celebrations marking the fall of the military junta, White travelled to Athens in November 1983. His speech ‘Greece - My Other Country’ while never actually delivered, is a declaration of cultural affiliation and affection, in which White asks rhetorically, “How could I resist returning at this point, when the close ties of love and friendship, the events of history, and those vertiginous landscapes of yours, tell me that Greece is my other country?” White’s connection to Greece permeates his work, from short stories set in Anatolia, Athens, and the Levant, to Greek characters in many novels, to the the prevalence of Greek religious and symbolic imagery. At the same time, ‘Greekness’ was a literal and prominent concern in White’s life, embodied, of course in the presence of Manoly Lascaris, White’s partner of forty-nine years and his “central mandala” (Flaws in the Glass 100). This paper will explore the signifier of ‘Greekness’ as inscribed by White through an examination of the Greek, Byzantine and Orthodox facets of his work, with a particular focus on The Twyborn Affair. It will attend to the implications of these Greek objects, entities and moments for the representation of fictional selves, and consider the interplay of fictional and biographical elements in their construction.' (Publication abstract)