AustLit

'South Flows the Pearl is a fascinating journey through the history of Chinese Australia. Taking the reader from Shanghai and the Pearl River Delta to Sydney, Perth, Cairns, Darwin, Bendigo and beyond, it explores the struggles and successes of Chinese people in Australia since the 1850s, as told in their own words.

'This unique book was written by an insider. Mavis Yen was born in Perth in 1916, the daughter of a Chinese father and an Australian mother. She lived in both countries and understood what it meant to navigate two worlds, to live through war and revolution, and to experience racial discrimination. In the 1980s she began interviewing elderly Chinese Australians, recording hours of conversations. Her intimate understanding of their languages and life experiences encouraged them to share their stories. Published here for the first time, they will change how you think about Australian history.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'One of the giants of Australian literature and the only Australian writer to have won the Nobel Prize for Literature, Patrick White received less acclaim when he turned his hand to playwriting.

'In Patrick White’s Theatre, Denise Varney offers a new analysis of White’s eight published plays, discussing how they have been staged and received over a period of 60 years. From the sensational rejection of The Ham Funeral by the Adelaide Festival in 1962 to 21st-century revivals incorporating digital technology, these productions and their reception illustrate the major shifts that have taken place in Australian theatre over time. Varney unpacks White’s complex and unique theatrical imagination, the social issues that preoccupied him as a playwright, and his place in the wider Australian modernist and theatrical traditions.'

Source: Abstract.

'Eliza Hamilton Dunlop (1796–1880) arrived in Sydney in 1838 and became almost immediately notorious for her poem “The Aboriginal Mother,” written in response to the infamous Myall Creek massacre. She published more poetry in colonial newspapers during her lifetime, but for the century following her death her work was largely neglected. In recent years, however, critical interest in Dunlop has increased, in Australia and internationally and in a range of fields, including literary studies; settler, postcolonial and imperial studies; and Indigenous studies.

'This stimulating collection of essays by leading scholars considers Dunlop's work from a range of perspectives and includes a new selection of her poetry.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Animal Dreams collects David Brooks’ thought-provoking essays about how humans think, dream and write about other species. Brooks examines how animals have featured in Australian and international literature and culture, from ‘The Man from Snowy River’ to Rainer Maria Rilke and The Turin Horse, to live-animal exports, veganism, and the culling of native and non-native species. In his piercing, elegant, widely celebrated style, he considers how private and public conversations about animals reflect older and deeper attitudes to our own and other species, and what questions we must ask to move these conversations forward, in what he calls ‘the immense work of undoing’.

'For readers interested in animal welfare, conservation, and the relationship between humans and other species, Animal Dreams will be an essential, richly rewarding companion.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Dingo Bold is a thought-provoking exploration of the relationship between people and dingoes. At its heart is Rowena Lennox's encounter with a dingo on the beach on K’gari (Fraser Island), a young male she nicknames Bold. Struck by this experience, and by the intense, often polarised opinions expressed in public conversations about dingo conservation and control, she sets out to understand the complex relationship between humans and dingoes.

'Weaving together ecological data, interviews with people connected personally and professionally with K’gari’s dingoes, and Lennox's expansive reading of literary, historical and scientific accounts, Dingo Bold considers what we know about the history of relations between dingoes and humans, and what preconceptions shape our attitudes today. Do we see dingoes as native wildlife or feral dogs? Wild or domesticated animals? A tourist attraction or a threat? And how do our answers to these questions shape our interactions with them?

'Dingo Bold is both a moving memoir of love and loss through Lennox's observations of the natural world and an important contribution to wider conversations about conservation and animal welfare.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Djalkiri are footprints, ancestral imprints on the landscape that provide the Yolŋu people of eastern Arnhem Land with their spiritual foundations.
This book explores Yolŋu art and material culture through the voices of those who have been involved with Yolŋu collections over time. With contributions from Yolŋu elders and artists, art historians and museum curators, it describes how communities and museums have worked together in the past, how the relationship has changed, and how Yolŋu philosophies can guide how we engage with Yolŋu art. Some of the collections featured here were created almost 100 years ago and have rarely been on public display. In Djalkiri, members of the Milingimbi/Yurrwi Island, Ramingining and Yirrkala communities offer insight into their historical, contemporary, and deeper time meanings.' (Publication summary)

'Gail Jones: Word, Image, Ethics is an accessible guide to the writings of Gail Jones, the award-winning Australian author, essayist and academic.

'Drawing together ideas from literature, art, philosophy and photography, the volume presents a compelling analysis of Jones’ literary commitment to the political and the personal, and reflects on how and why we interpret literary texts.

'An essential contribution to the intersecting fields of Australian studies and international literature, Gail Jones: Word, Image, Ethics offers innovative insights into the writing of one of Australia’s most accomplished authors.' (Publication summary)

'Fallen Among Reformers focuses on Stella Miles Franklin's New Woman protest literature written during her time in Chicago with the National Women's Trade Union League (1906-1915). This time away from literary pursuits enriched Franklin's literary productivity and provided a feminist social justice ethics, which shaped her writing.

'Close readings of Franklin's (mostly unpublished) short stories, plays, and novels contextualises them in the personal politics of her everyday life and historicises them in the socio-economic and literary realities of early twentieth century Australia and United States: themes embedded in broader cultural patterns of socialism, pacifism, and feminism.' (Publication summary) 

'Manikay are the ancestral songs of Arnhem Land, passed down over generations and containing vital cultural knowledge.

'Singing Bones foregrounds the voices of manikay singers from Ngukurr in southeastern Arnhem Land, and charts their critically acclaimed collaboration with jazz musicians from the Australian Art Orchestra, Crossing Roper Bar. It offers an overview of Wägilak manikay narratives and style, including their social, ceremonial and linguistic aspects, and explores the Crossing Roper Bar project as an example of creative intercultural collaboration and a continuation of the manikay tradition.' (Publication summary)

'Place-based cultural knowledge – of ceremonies, songs, stories, language, kinship and ecology – binds Australian Indigenous societies together. Over the last 100 years or so, records of this knowledge in many different formats – audiocassettes, photographs, films, written texts, maps, and digital recordings – have been accumulating at an ever-increasing rate. Yet this extensive documentary heritage is dispersed. In many cases, the Indigenous people who participated in the creation of the records, or their descendants, have little idea of where to find the records or how to access them. Some records are held precariously in ad hoc collections, and their caretakers may be perplexed as to how to ensure that they are looked after.

'Archival Returns: Central Australia and Beyond explores the strategies and practices by which cultural heritage materials can be returned to their communities of origin, and the issues this process raises for communities, as well as for museums, galleries, and other cultural institutions.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'There is beauty in diversity. Whether it’s something that everyone can see, or something invisible, we walk around with it every day, and it informs all of our experiences. Diversity has challenged and transformed our societies and cultures, making us all better people.

'Through unique stories, experiences and expressions, this anthology explores how diversity has shaped our world, how it has empowered us and connected our communities. By exploring numerous experiences, from partying at Mardi Gras to being unapologetically Arabic, the 2019 Sydney University Student Anthology shows that diversity unites and enriches our lives.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Gerald Murnane is one of Australia’s most important contemporary authors, but for years was neglected by critics. In 2018 the New York Times described him as “the greatest living English-language writer most people have never heard of” and tipped him as a future Nobel Prize winner.

'Gerald Murnane: Another World in This One coincides with a renewed interest in his work. It includes an important new essay by Murnane himself, alongside chapters by established and emerging literary critics from Australia and internationally. Together they provide a stimulating reassessment of Murnane’s diverse body of work.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Caroline Leakey, writing as Oliné Keese, published her first and only novel, The Broad Arrow, in 1859. It tells the story of Maida Gwynnham, a young middleclass woman lured into committing a forgery by her deceitful lover, Captain Norwell, and then wrongly convicted of infanticide. The novel’s title describes the arrow that was stamped onto government property, including the clothes worn by convicts — a symbol of shame and incarceration. With its ‘fallen woman’ protagonist, its gothic undertones and its exploration of the social and moral implications of the penal system, this little-known novel gives an insight into a significant chapter of Australian history from a uniquely female perspective.' (Publication summary)

'From the late nineteenth century, academic disciplines emerged in universities, marking boundaries of knowledge, teaching and research. Education became a transnational academic discipline, developing across Britain, Europe and North America and providing a foundation for the teaching profession.

'Educated in Edinburgh, Alexander Mackie was influenced by German idealist philosophy and by progressive views of teaching drawn from the United States. He carried his academic values across the Empire when he was appointed the inaugural principal of Sydney Teachers’ College and professor of education at the University of Sydney.

'For almost four decades, Mackie struggled to sustain education as an academic discipline and teaching as an autonomous profession. Failing health hindered his efforts, but many of his values were passed on to his children. Grounded in their father’s educational philosophy, Mackie’s daughter, Margaret, and son, John, became academics, engaging with the transnational postwar worlds of inquiry and research.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Although Christina Stead is best known for the mid-century masterpiece set in Washington D.C. and Baltimore, The Man Who Loved Children, it was not her only work about the America. Five of Christina Stead’s mid-career novels deal with the United States, capturing and critiquing American life with characteristic sharpness and originality.

'In this examination of Stead’s American work, Fiona Morrison explores Stead’s profound engagement with American politics and culture and their influence on her “restlessly experimental” style. Through the turbulent political and artistic debates of the 1930s, the Second World War, and the emergence of McCarthyism, the “matter” of America provoked Stead to continue to create new ways of writing about politics, gender and modernity.

'This is the first critical study to focus on Stead’s time in America and its influence on her writing. Morrison argues compellingly that Stead’s American novels “reveal the work of the greatest political woman writer of the mid twentieth century”, and that Stead’s account of American ideology and national identity remains extraordinarily prescient, even today.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.