AustLit

'A personal reflection and an ambitious, overarching reading of Maria Tumarkin as a writer, and her place in the contemporary Australian literary zeitgeist.

'Why is Maria Tumarkin a significant writer today?

'What are the worlds-personal, social, and intellectual-that have helped to form her perspective? Where does she fit within the circles of key Australian writers and thinkers? What are the boundaries that her work pushes against? And what future does she see for us in Australia and beyond?

'In Tumarkin, which inaugurates the Contemporary Australian Writers series, noted critic and author Patrick Allington registers his intellectual and emotional reaction to Maria Tumarkin's witty, often blunt, always complex interpretations of Australia and the world.

'In the era of the rushed think piece, Allington explores the depth of Tumarkin's persistent, historically informed concern with questions of personal and social belonging, disruption and dislocation. He asks how we might most usefully respond to a body of writing that is urgent, important and unsettling but contains no simple manifesto.' (Publication summary)

'Each morning, the last humans start their day with graphic footage from the front. This is what sustains them — literally. In a world where eight billion souls have perished, the survivors huddle together apart, perpetually at war, in the city-states of Rise and Shine. Yet this war, far from representing their doom, is their means of survival. For their leaders have found the key to life when crops, livestock, and the very future have been blighted — a key that turns on each citizen being moved by human suffering. The question is, with memories still bright of all the friends they’ve lost, all the experience they’ll never know, will compassion be enough? Or must they succumb to, or even embrace, darker desires?'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'As we were proofreading this introduction, the new(ish) Prime Minister of Australia, Scott Morrison, responded to the warnings of a special report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change by defending the Australian coal industry (Hannam & Latimer 2018). In reference to the Green Climate Fund, set up by the nations that make up the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in support of developing nations responding to climate change, Morrison added, ‘Nor are we bound to go and tip money into that big climate fund. We’re not going to do that either. I’m not going to spend money on global climate conferences and all that nonsense’ (Karp 2018).' (Introduction)

'This discursive essay – part exegesis, part literary analysis – analyses the act of writing about Asia from Australia (and from the west). I use the circumstances of my early childhood to frame my interest in ‘Asia’, suggesting that Australia is a genuinely diverse nation that is engaged with the region but that it also retains and values a monocultural outlook. In turn, I analyse several novels by westerners about Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge (including my own novel, Figurehead) to reflect on, first, cultural appropriation, and, second, the limits of empathy in fiction.'

'This paper analyses the memoirs of Australian writer Alice Pung in the contexts of her suburban Melbourne upbringing, her parents’ status as refugees, and Cambodia’s Pol Pot period. The author discusses the changed way Pung deals with the Pol Pot period from Unpolished Gem (2006) to Her Father’s Daughter (2011), and in particular the necessary disjointedness that is a consequence of the latter memoir’s more direct and deep focus on Pung’s father’s experiences during the Pol Pot period. The author concludes by locating Pung’s works, particularly Her Father’s Daughter, among various other memoirs of the Pol Pot period, including poet U Sam Oeur’s memoir, Crossing Three Wildernesses (2005). Placed among other memoirs of survival and loss, the author suggests, Pung brings a distinctive perspective as the child of a survivor of the Pol Pot period.'  (Publication abstract)

'In his fiction, Steven Carroll stretches and slows time. He combines this with deliberate over-explaining and repetition, the echoing of memories and ideas, coincidence, and theatricality. A distinctive rhythm results: when reading his work, I often find myself nodding in time to the words. Occasionally – and it happens now and again in his new novel, A New England Affair – the prose starts to resemble a pizza with too many toppings. Mostly, though, Carroll’s approach to fiction succeeds even when it seemingly shouldn’t. If it’s a mystery – a minor miracle, even – that the various techniques he employs come together to create stylised and yet fresh prose, then that mystery itself becomes part of the pleasure of reading a Carroll novel.' (Introduction)

1974 – Ronald McKie The Mango Tree

1973 – No award

1972 – Thea Astley The Acolyte

'When adjudicating on novels published in 1973 — the year Gough Whitlam’s Labor government bought Jackson Pollock’s ‘Blue Poles’, the year the delightfully awful Alvin Purple was released, and the year Patrick White won the Nobel Prize for Literature — the judges of the Miles Franklin Literary Award decided not to name a winner. Their statement read:

''This is the first time since the Award was established in 1957 that the judges have failed to find an Australian novel of sufficient merit among the entries to warrant the prize. … One of the Judges, Professor Colin Roderick … said it was regrettable that more eligible published novels were not entered for such a substantial Award ($1,250).''

(Introduction)

'When it came to colourful and controversial views, the long-time mayor of Port Augusta, Joy Baluch, set elite standards: 'I hate sport,' she said in 2008:

I've never had time for it, been too busy looking after a family, you know, surviving. It's a waste of time. I hate football and tennis and golf...and if ever the Asians are going to come in it's going to be on grand final day... And they'll just take over peacefully. ' (Publication abstract)

'The academic, critic and nun Veronica Brady once wrote that Thomas Keneally ‘has always been a writer who mattered, even when he is writing too much too quickly’ (74). For several reasons, I often ponder this brilliant line. First, it captures a fundamental truth—perhaps the fundamental truth—about Keneally’s oeuvre. Indeed, it is an even more accurate appraisal of Keneally’s legacy in 2016, taking into consideration his more than fifty published books, than it was when it appeared in the literary magazine Meanjin in 1979. Second, the brevity of Brady’s observation is admirable: she uses so few words to say so much so well. Third, Brady here offers a mixed critical response: she is at once positive and negative about Keneally, with the two responses commingling rather than competing; her tone is moderate.' (Introduction)

'This special section on book reviewing in Australia emerges from the symposium Critical Matters: Book Reviewing Now, held at the Wheeler Centre in Melbourne on 9 April 2015 and hosted by Monash University’s Centre for the Book. This symposium, the first of its kind ever to take place in Australia, brought together over thirty reviewers, academics, writers, literary editors and publishers to debate a series of ‘provocations’ on topics such as the necessity of negative reviews, the problem with pitching, the anachronistic nature of critical jargon, the pros and cons of ‘clubbishness’, and the advent of online reviewing sites. Like the symposium, this special section consciously refuses two premises: namely that, before we even start to talk about book reviewing itself, we have to defend its right to exist or that it is in a state of crisis. Instead, this special section understands book reviewing to be a dynamic field that has influence beyond itself, and that can and should be treated to sustained attention by academics.' (Introduction)