AustLit

'Teresa Dovey once advocated that writers inhabit genres and forms and ideological positions as hermit crabs inhabit shells. In this paper, I position the writer as ‘hermit crab’ suggesting a position of displacement that is generative. From this position, a palimpsestic approach to writing can work as a liberating force, enabling an author to move between genres, forms and ideological positions, resulting in fruitful experimentation, innovation and new knowledge. As a writer of books across a range of genres, I have been inspired by J.M. Coetzee and Umberto Eco, both of whom, I propose, use this (Barthesian) atopic process to interrogate, innovate and stimulate their writing praxis.' (Publication abstract)

'Ten people. Twelve days. One killer.

'Ten people meet for a reunion at a remote castle, organised by a preacher who once held them in a Christian cult. One by one, the old friends are brutally murdered, and yet their killer remains hidden in their very midst.

'Rafe attends the reunion at the castle for one reason only: to settle once and for all how he really feels about his childhood obsession, Suzanne. Rivalry reignites at the outset as the men who all loved and fought over Suzanne are brought together once more.

'Is Suzanne the reason for these serial killings?

'Is the murderer a jealous unrequited lover?

'Or is she the femme fatale with a bloody agenda?

'As tension mounts, Rafe must play this deadly game in order to identify and neutralise the hidden serial killer before he himself becomes the next victim…'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'a) The researched topic Climate change poses massive and varied challenges to the ways in which people live throughout the Asia-Pacific region. And despite the earnest requests of many of its most vulnerable peoples, emissions of greenhouse gases over the past few decades have made many climate-change impacts unavoidable, whatever action the world now takes to reduce these emissions. Emissions reductions and the clean energy initiatives that underpin them are still desirable since they will affect the world our descendants inherit in fifty or sixty years’ time but within that period – at least – we have no choice but to adapt to the changes we have brought upon ourselves.

'b) Creative response A ficto-critical piece that seeks to represent the scientific ‘reality’ of ‘drowning islands’ / ‘global warming’ in narrative form through the eyes of a narrator and a Torres-Strait islander whose people fled the drowning island of Saibai in the 1940s. This piece includes song lyrics, Biblical verses, post-apocalyptic images of drowning islands, literary motifs, and a narrative scenario which serves as a microcosm of this impending crisis.' (Publication abstract)

'Danny Anderson—and his friends, Gustave and Jennifer—are the Animal Police. They uphold justice and protection for animals everywhere. Even though they’re kids, and their exploits usually only get them in trouble. One day, on the run from bullies, Danny and his friends find themselves hiding in a cave. When they finally escape, everything seems…different. The people seem more observant, more diligent. And animals are being protected. Danny has always dreamed of a world with equal rights for all, including other species. He should be happy. Except something seems strange about this place. It isn’t home. It isn’t right. It’s almost like an alternate world, a parallel dimension, crafted entirely to teach a singular lesson: Be careful what you wish for.' (Publication summary)

'From da kokroach point of view, humans are irrelvant. Kokroaches no like em. Doan want em. Do not even tink bout em. Doan care for deh conversations. Books we like to eat, not read. We wish humans dead so we can eat em too. — Sizwe Bantu, The Cockroach Whisperer, 2010.

'Sizwe Bantu is the Greatest African Writer of All Time – according to Timothy Turner, failed academic and lover, who not only lives by Bantu’s words but keeps a giant rubber cockroach in homage to the writer of the renowned ‘cockroach stories’.

'Inspired to travel to Bantu country, Timothy takes up a position at a university near the place rumoured to be the reclusive writer’s residence in the misty Zululand hills. Instead of drawing closer to his source of inspiration, Timothy is drawn into a Machiavellian world of campus politics and suppressed desire.

'As Timothy grapples with the mystery surrounding Makaya, the academic he has replaced, and the demands of his students, particularly the attractive Tracey, he must confront his own paranoia, prejudice and insecurity in a search for the shocking truth.' (Publication abstract)

‘J.M. Coetzee’s early novels Dusklands (1974) and Waiting for the Barbarians (1980) outline the Western imperialist project to colonise and subjugate ‘other’ people, animals and the environment. The masculine colonising subject (in Cartesian terms, res inextensa) has separated itself from the world (res extensa) and seeks to conquer and subjugate in order to subsume it. Dusklands comprises two narratives: one, that of Jacobus Coetzee who hunts human and nonhuman animals and leaves a destructive trail behind him as he blazes a frontier in 1800s South Africa; and two, Eugene Dawn, an American mythographer, who advocates his ‘Vietnam Project’ to win the US war in Vietnam in the early 1970s by defoliating the environment and hunting the Vietcong ‘like animals’. In Waiting for the Barbarians, Colonel Joll deals with the Barbarian ‘threat’ to his Empire by similarly destroying the environment, hunting barbarians, and torturing woman and children. Each character is locked into a Cartesian ‘self’ consciousness that cannot interact with the ‘other’ (female, nonhuman animal, ‘indigenous’) except through violence and destruction. Hunting is a manifestation of this disease and the protagonists make no distinction between human, animal or vegetable in their path of destruction in the name of colonial expansion.' (Publication abstract)