AustLit

'Drawing on fieldwork in the Victorian Mallee region of Australia, this article explores the ways in which reading groups can elicit rich information about the relationship between literature, reading, and place. The study found that book group participants “recognized” the Mallee in the texts under discussion and engaged in their own forms of place knowledge and “history‑telling” in response, making corrections to, and even rejecting, literary representations of their area. We argue that the resources for enhancing literary infrastructure exist, both in the broad history and diversity of Mallee writing, and in the social infrastructure of the Mallee. Readers’ knowledge, captured through book‑related discussion in community spaces, offers the potential for enhancing existing literary resources in rural and remote regions.'

Source: Abstract.

'Writing Belonging at the Millennium brings together two pressing and interrelated matters: the global environmental impacts of post-industrial economies and the politics of place in settler-colonial societies. It focuses on Australia at the millennium, when the legacies of colonization intersected with intensifying environmental challenges in a climate of anxiety surrounding settler-colonial belonging. The question of what “belonging means is central to the discussion of the unfolding politics of place in Australia and beyond.

'In this book, Emily Potter negotiates the meaning of belonging in a settler-colonial field and considers the role of literary texts in feeding and contesting these legacies and anxieties. Its intention is to interrogate the assumption that non-indigenous Australians' increasingly unsustainable environmental practices represent a failure on their part to adequately belong in the country. Writing Belonging at the Millennium explores the idea of unsettled non-indigenous belonging as context for the emergence of potentially decolonized relations with place in a time of heightened global environmental concern.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Text’s new edition of Helen Garner’s 1977 novel Monkey Grip is an opportunity to revisit the book’s influence on Melbourne. In addition to being widely considered a classic of Australian fiction, Monkey Grip is frequently referred to as an iconic ‘Melbourne’ novel. Certainly, it is a novel absolutely grounded in and shaped by place. Monkey Grip exhibits an intimacy with place that is built through local knowledge and the regular, routine movement through the spaces of one’s life. The city is much more than a backdrop to action. For Nora, the narrator and protagonist, it is the locus of the social encounter and emotional intensity on which the book’s narrative depends...'  (Introduction)

'This special issue showcases the diverse ways in which Australian literature and place-making are brought together in contemporary literary scholarship. The seven essays, as well as the creative work by artist and scholar Ross Gibson, illuminate place as intimately constituted by narrative practice, and reflexively, show how geographies and environments inform literary forms, modes and, to use Jennifer Hamilton’s productive term, ‘tones.’ Poetics and placemaking are closely bound. This is of particular consequence in our national context, where ongoing cultures of colonisation, and the political potential of decolonising practices, are both enabled by the kinds of stories we tell both about and through our occupation of place. Storytelling is never neutral, nor is it dematerial. It is always, profoundly, active and has effects on the composition of the world; it is also collaborative, and not always with other human actors. Thinking about a potentially decolonised place requires an interrogation of what enables the enduring capacity of space to exclude and dispossess. It means understanding how words ‘do’ work. The essays included here understand this work in a range of ways and through distinct frames.' (1)