AustLit

'In 1982, Michael Symons published One Continuous Picnic: A History of Eating in Australia. The twenty-fifth-anniversary edition extended the subtitle with the addition of the "g" word as a sign of national progress and maturation, so that it read, A Gastronomic History of Australian Eating. The main title, while remaining the same, originally read ironically, like Donald Horne's title for The Lucky Country, suggesting a settler culture lacking in discipline, ambition, or taste—whereas by the time of the anniversary edition, "the continuous picnic" had become a full-blown paradox, conjuring simultaneously both progress and decline. It speaks now of nostalgia for a more innocent time, the naiveté (some would say the perversity) of which lay in its self-satisfaction. So what exactly does the picnic signify in Australian culture? What was its original conception, and how has it evolved as a representative image of the Australian way of life?' (Introduction)

'Before the appearance of his first major book, Capricornia (1938), the Australian novelist Xavier Herbert published approximately forty short stories under different names in a variety of magazines and newspapers.' These are gener-ally regarded as immature, written before he discovered either his voice or his theme, when he was experimenting with different audiences, genres, subjects and pseudonyms, and trying to establish a literary career. Of these early stories, about one quarter have maritime settings, mostly in the Timor, the Arafura, or the Coral Seas. Only two are set in Melanesia: The Ape-Men of Mobongu; in what was then commonly known as Dutch New Guinea, and The Other McLean; in the Solomon Islands. The first appeared in The Boys Weekly in 1927, the second in the Australian Journal (and the Northern Standard the following year).2 In this essay I intend to take a small step toward addressing the fiction of disconnection between Australia and its Pacific neighbours that, until the recent transnational turn in the humanities, Australian scholars have for the most part maintained simply by preferring national to comparative contexts of enquiry. Paul Sharrad has done more than most to extend the Australian frame of reference to include Pacific and south-east Asian cultural production. For that reason, lam pleased to take the opportunity provided by this publication in his honour not only to revisit the facts of Herbert's experience in the Australian-mandated territories of the Pacific in the 1920s, but also to ask what influence it had on his formation as an Australian writer in the 1930s.'  (Introduction)

'This book tracks across history and cultures the ways in which writers have imagined cyclones, hurricanes, and typhoons, collectively understood as “tropical weather.” Historically, literature has drawn upon the natural world for its store of symbolic language and technical device, making use of violent storms in the form of plot, drama, trope, and image in order to highlight their relationship to the political, social, and psychological realms of human affairs. Charting this relationship through writers such as Joseph Conrad, Herman Melville, Gisèle Pineau, and other writers from places like Australia, Japan, Mauritius, the Caribbean, and the Philippines, this ground-breaking collection of essays illuminates the specificities of the ways local, national, and regional communities have made sense and even relied upon the literary to endure the devastation caused by deadly tropical weather.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'In today’s global celebrity culture it’s hard to imagine a word more over-used and abused than ‘genius’. It is a slippery word with a long and contradictory conceptual history. Yet, in the Land of the Tall Poppy, self-confessions of genius invariably have paved a broad road to public ridicule and denigration. Xavier Herbert’s notion of genius was not static. It changed throughout his life and it evolved through his writing. He agreed with Carlyle that the first condition of genius must always be a ‘transcendent capacity of taking trouble’ and on this foundation he built his own concept of genius, as the unending ‘capacity for loving’. This article explores what genius meant to Xavier Herbert and how it translated into his fiction, before considering how our sense of genius today influences the way we respond to his most challenging fictions of love and hate, 'Capricornia' and 'Poor Fellow My Country'.'  (Publication abstract)

'For historical reasons as well as strategic political purposes the deployment of indigeneity as a category of identity across the human world varies enormously This has led to a number of confusions about what indigeneity is, and hence who its legitimate subscribers are. In some contexts indigeneity emerges as a competitive rather than a collaborative project To complicate matters further, indigeneity is a category of identification that applies to animal and botanical subjects as well as human-animal In this essay, a cosmo-politan and posthuman perspective is opened on the question of introduced and indigenous species. Working through two case studies of indigeneity and exoticism — the Australian dingo (wild dog) and the Australian brumby (wild horse) —the essay re-imagines indigeneity as a category of identity not restricted to but crucially enabling of what it means to be human.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.