AustLit

'A Bee’s Guide to Bothering takes its cue from Leonardo da Vinci’s observation that the bee does not simply collect and use but digests and transforms. It considers firstly, how our understanding of social interactions might borrow from those of the more-thanhuman and secondly, that we need to reconceptualise existence as closely connected to the more-than-human. As Maurice Maeterlinck noted as far back as 1901, “If the bee disappeared off the face of the earth, man would only have four years left to live.” As its title suggests, the collection plays upon the dual meaning of bothering as an act of care as much as an act of disturbance. The central question driving A Bee’s Guide to Bothering is: how might we creatively draw together these strands of care and activism? Taking a specifically feminist approach, the poetry collection considers how experiences of intimacy and labour have been shaped by cultural hierarchies and divisions around gender, race, capital, and nation. It explores how poetry might highlight existing social and ecological vulnerability and unsettle prescribed roles. In imaginatively teasing out and beginning the work of transforming relations, how might poetry lead to more sustainable forms of belonging and solidarity? The manuscript has developed out of “The Antagonist’s Care Pack” which was shortlisted for the 2019 Helen Anne Bell Bequest Poetry Award.' (Publication summary)

'This essay investigates the development of seeing as an affective, political and potentially transformative practice across the course of John Kinsella’s poetic career. It analyses how seeing becomes a means for Kinsella to apprehend the relationship between self and environment and to consider how local-scale is tied to broader-scale change. At the same time, it traces Kinsella’s concern at the ways in which Western theories of vision shape and reinforce structures of power, particularly in terms of gendered and colonial violence. Moving through and then past ekphrastic debates, I argue that Kinsella considers how poetry and art might, in their own ways, ethically engage with both the human and more-than-human and actively navigate and reflect upon states of connection.' (Publication abstract)

'Growing up in Australia in the 1970s, I much preferred the hijinks of Han Solo and Chewie to Princess Leia’s sexualised damsel in distress. My sister and I spent an entire summer pigging out on Choc Wedges and Barney Bananas so we could collect the men’s cricket team on specially marked sticks. Feminism seemed a world “far, far away”. Yet what Australian girls could and couldn’t do was being explored through a glut of screen adaptations of classic novels.' (Introduction)

'The conference coincided with the fortieth anniversary of both the Archives and of Mardi Gras, providing a timely point to consider not only how solidarities might be generated but also how to sustain and develop them. In also celebrating the start of Deakin University's Gender and Sexuality Studies Research Network, the conference was a reminder of the shifting histories of precarity and support within the academy and the complex issues that emerge in traversing the academy and communities. What does it mean to have a history or histories, what are the critical intersections of all our stories?" Closing with a reading of the "Uluru Statement from the Heart," Nestle's address situated these questions in the context of hopes for a decolonised future: what kind of solidarities will that require? In the Anthropocene where "even our breathing/seems to warm/the world too much," she suggests that maybe it is better to gather "my own disturbing junk heap" and to "not over-tread." [...]her poem, "The Wind Has No Borders," reflects on the importance of listening to others rather than just speaking one's own histories.' (Introduction)

'In their introduction to the Macquarie/ PEN Anthology of Aboriginal Literature, Anita Heiss and Peter Minter discern that Aboriginal writing has been in the "foreground of a renewed and particularly successful resistance to state authority" (4). They cite We Are Going by Oodgeroo Noonuccal as emblematic of an activist literature that is directed to her own community as well as a mainstream audience. Heiss and Minter situate Noonuccal's writing within the context of resistance literature, a genre which blurs creative and critical genres in being underwritten by "imperatives of radical critique, political action, and social change" (Harlow 2). Just over fifty years later, Narungga writer Natalie Harkin's installation art and first major poetry collection Dirty Words follows and extends Oodgeroo's lead. Just as Oodgeroo was partly influenced by the 1960s Black Rights Movement, Harkin's literary activism is shaped by Black feminism of the 1970s and by First Nations movements from around the world. Harkin views herself is part of an intimate conversation between those that seek to make "meaning in worlds steeped in histories of shared deep colonialisms" ("For You, K. Tsianina Lomawaima" 270). 
 

'While a large amount of Martin Johnston’s poetry, reviews, and interviews were gathered and edited by John Tranter in a 1993 publication, there has only been a handful of critical works engaging with his poetry. During his lifetime (1947–1990), Johnston published three collections of poetry, a novel, and a collection of Greek translations. He appeared in The New Australian Poetry (1979) and is often viewed as a key member of the ‘generation of 68.’ While Johnston’s poetry could sometimes be long and highly experimental, its anthologisation has tended towards the least difficult. Brian Kim Stefans suggests that Johnston juggles the desire for a public with an alternative sense of solipsism in much of his work, even going so far as to argue that it is Johnston’s ‘private singularity or sense of himself as unassimilable detail [that] makes him distinctive among Australian poets’ (n.p.). This desire might be viewed more broadly as a desire for cultural belonging or what Petro Alexiou terms ‘a deep emotional connection and empathy with common experience and culture’ (n.p.). Alexiou suggests that this desire for connection is in tension in Johnston’s writing with ‘a very complex intellectual and artistic response to it.’ This constant analysis of belonging, of try to understand the self’s relationship to culture, leads to a sense of unassimilable detail in Johnston’s work that is often bound up with a sense of excessive and endless textuality.' (Introduction)