AustLit

'This original collection of essays by emerging and established Aboriginal and Settler scholars provides interpretative and theoretical perspectives on Kim Scott’s work. Twelve essays deal with all of Scott’s novels to date, along with his collaborative non-fiction and his work in the Wirlomin Noongar Stories and Language Project. The collection as a whole amounts to a case for Kim Scott as Australia’s most representative novelist today. 

Over a quarter of a century he has explored and unravelled the intertwined destinies of Aboriginal and Settler from the moment of invasion, contact and occupancy to the contradictory aspirations and government policies of today. In carrying out this project Scott consistently engages with the history and discourses that shape the national imaginary. Paradoxically it is this focus on the national that establishes Kim Scott as an international writer of stature.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Marion May Campbell launches Ania Walwicz's horse RMIT Project Space, CArlton, 5 September 2018.'

'During a 1952 electric storm off Wattamolla NSW a waterspout drew in the CSIRO Cloud Physics Dakota, atomising all those aboard, including the writer’s father. Or did it? When his living body has disappeared, what to make of the uniformed man on the mantelpiece?

'Just as the waterspout gathers up living creatures and broken things to transport them elsewhere, this memoir dreams its way into the fragments of his life, along with the queer fall-out in its wake. When her grief-stricken mother deifies the disappeared, the daughter strives to become him. Sometimes it seems that fateful scenarios, including Cold War conspiracies and ill-conceived scientific projects, converge on the man on the mantelpiece; but at times of grace he steps down joyfully to resume the dance with the living.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

Research background

'Butler (1990) theorises that some writers explore sexuality as reiteration and performance. But how to write the erotic encounter between reciprocal readers whose bodies are caught in the lag of longing at the onset of death? Can dream and masquerade be enlisted to the task? The second-person address can be manipulative, associated as it is with the didactic. While it is kept in reflexive play in some high-modernist metafiction (Calvino 1979), and Wittig (1973) deploys the metamorphic potential of the lesbian I-you, how might the second person enable intimacy and reflexivity at once? '