AustLit

'Antipodean China is a collection of essays drawn from a series of encounters between Australian and Chinese writers, which took place in China and Australia over a period of almost ten years, from 2011. The engagement between the writers could be defensive, especially given the need to depend on translators, but as each spoke about the places important to them, their influences and the literary forms in which they wrote, resemblances between them emerged, and the different perspectives contributed to a sense of common understanding, about literature, and about the role of the writer in society. In some cases the communication was even stronger, as when the Tibetan author A Lai speaks knowingly about Alexis Wright’s novel Carpentaria, and the two winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Mo Yan and J.M. Coetzee, discuss what the Nobel meant for each of them.

'The collection also includes writing by some of the best Chinese and Australian writers: novelists Brian Castro, Gail Jones, Julia Leigh, Liu Zhengyun, Sheng Keyi and Xu Xiaobin, poets Kate Fagan, Ouyang Yu, Xi Chuan and Zheng Xiaoqiong, and translators Eric Abrahamsen, Li Yao and John Minford.

'In the current situation of hostility and suspicion between the two countries, this collection presents what, in retrospect, may seem to have been an idyllic moment of communication and trust.' (Publication summary)

'‘Unerring muse that makes the casual perfect’: Robert Lowell’s compliment to his friend Elizabeth Bishop comes to mind as I read Helen Garner. She is another artist who reveres the casual for its power to disrupt and illuminate. Nothing is ever really casual for her, but rather becomes part of a perfection that she resists at the same time. The ordinary in these diaries – the daily, the diurnal, the stumbled-upon, the breathing in and out – is turned into something else through the writer’s extraordinary craft.' (Introduction)

'I. 'Moon and Evening Star', Adelaide, October 2019/Yirrkala, June 2019

Among the glories of Tarnanthi, the Festival of Contemporary Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Art at the Art Gallery of South Australia in 2019, one work has special significance for me. It is a painting made with earth pigment on stringybark by Buwathay Munyarryun called Wirrmu ga Djurrpun, 'Moon and Evening Star' (Figure 1). Powerfully vertical, 225 by 62 cm, on a piece of bark that flares slightly at each end, the composition speaks precisely and with authority. You can feel the care with which the brush has made its marks. Animals, human footprints and birds move up through the panels of downward flowing water on either side to a crowning horizontal band where crescent moon and star appear white against the black sky. ' (Introduction)

'This book comprises a selection of poetry and prose by 25 Australian writers whose experience of China is reflected in their work. The writing covers the period from 1988 to 2018, four decades from the Australian bicentenary year of 1988, when migration from the mainland of China to Australia increased markedly, to the present, when China’s resurgence in wealth and power makes it a major partner in many areas of Australian life.

'The writers included in this anthology have lived through that transformation which is reflected in their life experience, their travels, their encounters and relationships, and in their work. The experience of China is cultural too, through engagement with Chinese language, art, literature and philosophy, as it comes to be present in new writing. In making the selection, we have understood ‘transcultural’ to include the commitment to create something new from the coming together of different cultural formations. The writing is open, curious, experimental, inventive and full of feeling. It invites further dialogue and response. It imagines other worlds and alternative possibilities. It enriches and enlivens the literature of Australia and China as it does so.

'The collection features writing from: Kim Cheng Boey, Lachlan Brown, Felicity Castagna, Brian Castro, Tom Cho, Eileen Chong, Robert Gray , Nicholas Hasluck, Linda Jaivin, Gail Jones, Nicholas Jose, John Kinsella, Julie Koh, Bella Li, Isabelle Li, Miriam Wei, Wei Lo, John Mateer, Jennifer Mills, Ouyang Yu, Glen Phillips, James Stuart, Jessie Tu, Beth Yahp, Alexis Wright and Fay Zwicky.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Rebecca was good with houses. Her life had been a series of them - homes, worlds - all remembered with intense fondness, as if the gains she made from those houses never wholly compensated for the loss each time she moved on. Whenever we talked about the past, Rebecca would refer to each house by name, in shorthand for that phase of her life. Northam Road, the semi-detached in Oxford that we shared, meant student days when the world was all before us. Then Hackney, the unrenovated carapace that was Rebecca's first move into London property, a footing on a ladder that would climb to fabled prosperity for her generation. Montmorency Gardens followed, an elegant address for a difficult but creative marriage and a young family. Finally, Austen Road, North London. This was Rebecca's blessed house for all seasons and kept on revealing new corners and layers, from basement to attic, as the years went by...' (Publication abstract)

'One way the history of a publishing house can be told is through the readers of the books that a publisher produces. Not a generic general reader, but individual readers and their personal histories that entwine with the publisher’s history, through books, over the years. As readers reflect on and are changed by particular books, a larger cultural and social history is made. That, at least, is my case in relation to UQP, and I’d like to share some of that history with you.' (Introduction)

'One of the titles in Lachlan Brown’s new book is ‘(sorites and another traveller’s song)’. The parenthesis is a sign of casual deflection. The title of the poem is an add-on. It could be something else. But actually it provides a good description of the whole, which is a lyrical reflection of a journey and a heap of other things. ‘Sorites’ means ‘heap’, referring here to hoarding—the poet’s grandmother’s literal obsessive hoarding, as well as the metaphorical hoarding of memories, stories, observations and associations that make up (this) poetry—and conceptually to the paradox of a heap. Does a heap stay the same as things are added to it or taken away? When is a heap not a heap but just detritus, nothing? For a certain kind of contemporary Australian poetry, of which Brown’s is an appealing example, this is a problem of situatedness, of inheritance.' (Introduction)

'The essay charts the history and goals of Asia Pacific Writers & Translators since its beginnings in 2005, noting how the association has evolved to incorporate creative writing pedagogy and, importantly, literary translation. It draws on linguist MAK Halliday’s discussion of the ‘characterology’ of Mandarin Chinese to ask whether a literary community such as APWT might also have a ‘certain cut’ identifiable in the features and effects of the new writing that emerges from the interactions of participating practitioners as they cross boundaries and challenge limits. The essay argues that the mission of APWT is transformative and ongoing and needs greater advocacy. Examples cited include the work of Michelle Cahill and Eliza Vitri Handayani and the Dalit/Indigenous Australia special issue of Cordite.

'Harriet Chandler didn’t make it onto the list of best novels of 2015 as far as I know. That may be because it was published in 2014, when it didn’t make the list either, or because its author, Moya Costello, calls it a ‘novella’, in her own redefinition of the term as a short, intense mix of ‘prose poem and prose fiction’, rather than a novel as such. At any rate, its appearance escaped notice, like some shy bush animal. The closest I can find to a reference in the mainstream media is Xu Qin’s piece in Shanghai Daily, ‘Profile of an inspiring woman’. Harriet Chandler is the first book from Short Odds Publications, another avatar of the author, whose act of self-publishing may also have got in the way. As Anna Couani explains, Costello, like herself, was ‘in the Sydney Women Writers’ Workshop (aka The No Regrets Group) in the 70’s and 80’s … [and] shared the feminist values of the group’ which included, in Costello’s words, ‘a radical critique of the industry context of their creative work’. Taking the means of production and dissemination into your own hands through self-publication is a logical extension of this spirit in technologically as well as politically changed times. It throws a spanner into the established system of book marketing and promotional recognition. The Prime Minister’s Literary Award, for example, makes it explicit that ‘self-published books are not eligible’, even if to self-publish successfully requires a high degree of editorial, design and book-producing skills, collaboratively integrated, as well as the writing talent.' (Introduction)

'R. G. (Guy) Howarth (1906-74) was a poet, scholar, teacher and advocate for Australian literature. He was foundation editor of Southerly from 1939 to 1956. From 1955 to 1971 he was Arderne Professor of English Literature in the University of Cape Town, a position he accepted after he was passed over for the prestigious Challis Chair at Sydney University in a disappointment that stayed with him to his premature end.

'In Cape Town Howarth continued his research on English and Australian literature, and began to teach South African writing. In 'Sisters of the South' (1958) he made a case for comparing Australian, New Zealand and South African literature. He introduced a course called Imaginative Writing which J.M. Coetzee took as a student. In Youth (2002), Coetzee's protagonist remembers: 'Howarth, who is an Australian, seems to have taken a liking to him, he cannot see why.' Howarth introduced Coetzee and other UCT students to Australian writers. He encouraged Coetzee to approach Prof Joseph Jones at the University of Texas at Austin about graduate study. Today Coetzee's archive sits with both Howarth's and Jones's in the Harry Ransom Center at UTA.

'Jones saw in Howarth the avatar of 'a new-type literary historian' who would be polymathically able to approach 'all literature in English-as a reticulated if not yet wholly integrated world-phenomenon'. For Coetzee, Howarth is an example of a teacher who 'may not have much of inherent significance to convey' yet can still 'exert a shaping influence on his students'. This long legacy re-opens the question of what happened in Sydney in 1951 where a road blocked for Howarth became a road ahead elsewhere.' (Publication abstract)