AustLit

'Placing McGahan’s last novel in the context of his interest in the opposition between nature and man-made constructions explored in some of his earlier works, the paper explores the epic scale of this conflict as it plays out in his last novel, The Rich Man’s House. Namely, various conventions of the epic genre are adopted and adapted to suggest the historical, global and national importance of the battle between the self-aggrandising mankind and nature on the brink of survival.'  (Publication abstract)

'Journals of the earliest British visitors to Australian shores facilitated the creation of the image of Australian Indigenous nations as savage, primitive and inferior in every aspect of their appearance and their way of life to both Europeans and indigenous peoples of other lands. In 1688, William Dampier described the inhabitants of “New Holland” as “the miserablest people in the world … having no [sic] one graceful feature in their faces.” In 1770, James Cook found the natives’ canoes “the worst … [he] ever saw” (A New Voyage ch. 16). The encounter took a hostile turn when beads and nails thrown at their feet failed to impress Aboriginal people and pave the way for a peaceful landing. Prejudiced descriptions and opinions justified European colonisation of Australia and dispossession of indigenous peoples. It took more than two centuries to revise those views. Literature was a powerful tool of colonisation and in turn was used by the colonised to oppose the coloniser. In this article, literature is examined as a tool for adopting fresh perspectives in education of new generations of young people in Australia about Cook’s discoveries on the Endeavour journey. The paper examines two children’s novels—The Goat Who Sailed the World by Jackie French (2006) and Captain Cook’s Apprentice by Anthony Hill (2008)—in order to demonstrate that these novels can be extremely important in educational, cultural and socio-political terms because they open the ground for a discussion of ideologies, social behaviour and cultural values in classroom, and thereby can contribute to the ongoing process of reconciliation in Australia.'

Source: Abstract.

'Alec Patrić's Black Rock White City (2015), a tale of two cities and two war refugees, won the 2016 Miles Franklin Award against the backdrop of an ongoing worldwide refugee crisis. Besides its topicality, this poignant rendition of migrant experience makes readers privy to the lives of suburban Melbournians, invites them to undertake detective work in solving a crime, and takes them on a journey across genres and modes of writing. The immediacy of the first-person narration is interrupted with scattered fragments of poetry, dislodged from Jovan's mind by the graffiti; passages from a novel-in-progress, which mark the beginning of Suzana's regeneration; and flashbacks from the characters' past, pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that readers are completing alongside the search for clues in a murder mystery. [...]it is up to them to decide if they are convinced by the unraveling and the final image in Suzana's admiring eyes of Jovan, "as expressionless as god remaking the world" (248), as he seizes the second chance to protect his family.'  (Publication abstract)

'In 1963, Michael Wilding left Oxford for Sydney, moving from an imperial center of British education to a far-flung colonial outpost beyond the daily reach of The Times, bringing with him "a generalised left wing politics" and "a working class resentment of exclusion from privilege" (161). In addition, his intellectual baggage contained a firm decision to become a writer. It was Wilding who would "in the smithy of his soul" help forge the literary conscience of the nation whose renowned man of letters he was to become.

'Growing Wild is a memoir which reads like a Künstlerroman in postmodernist style, tracing the trajectory of intellectual awakening and artistic development of the protagonist as he negotiates relationships with his family and the politics and history of both his native and adoptive countries. Wilding's memoir picks up where Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man leaves off the protagonist-in self-exile after he has left a restrictive environment for a freedom to become an artist, a writer. It begins in epic fashion, in medias res or "Among Leavisites" rather, landing the protagonist in the midst of F. R. Leavis's acolytes at University of Sydney's English Department and then, in broken chronology, takes the reader back to the first words on the slate in the English Midlands.' (Publication abstract)

Peter Carey is the master of dramatic, intriguing and far-fetched opening sentences, starting with his first novel Bliss ("Harry Joy was to die three times, but it was his first death which was to have the greatest effect on him"), through to his first short-listed Booker Prize novel Illywhacker ("My name is Herbert Badgery. I am a hundred and thirty-nine years old and something of a celebrity."), and to the second Booker Prize winning True History of the Kelly Gang ("I lost my own father at 12 yr. of age and know what it is to be raised on lies and silences my dear daughter you are presently too young to understand a word I write but this history is for you and will contain no single lie may I burn in Hell if I speak false."), to name but a few. In his thirteenth novel, Carey treats his readers to another arresting beginning in the style of Jarmusch's 1991 Night on Earth: "It was a spring evening in Washington DC; a chilly autumn morning in Melbourne; it was exactly 22.00 Greenwich Mean Time when a worm entered the computerised control systems of countless Australian prisons and released the locks in many other places of incarceration, some of which the hacker could not have known existed" (3). [From the journal's webpage]

'The anthology brings together twenty prose writers whose literary and personal stories term tendencies of contemporary Australian literary scene. This book I'll take readers on a journey through all major cities of Australia, but also through its unique interior, where they will, among other things, attend meetings, touching, track altercation between figure and writer, quotes thoughts of a deceased slusaNastala as a result of cooperation between the Serbian-Australian tandem editorial and supported by funds from the Australian Council for the arts, the anthology brings together twenty prose writers whose literary and personal stories term tendencies of contemporary Australian literary scene. ...' (Source: AbeBooks website)