AustLit

'This article considers some of the reasons why Irish-Australian literature has not been a significant trajectory within Australian literary studies and what it might offer if it were. Since the colonial era, Irish difference has been both recalcitrant and assimilable but, in the wake of Federation in 1901, Australian literature was concerned with the production of a national tradition and Irishness served to differentiate Australianness from Britishness. This article is concerned, then, with retrieving Irish difference. It extends my longstanding interest in Indigenous Australian literatures by analysing the representation of Irish Australians in Indigenous Australian writing, particularly moments of solidarity between the Irish and Indigenous Australians. After looking briefly at representations of colonial relations between the Irish and Aboriginal Australians in Jack Davis’ 1979 play Kullark and Eric Willmot’s historical novel Pemulwuy (1989), this article offers a reading of a minor scene in Alexis Wright’s Miles Franklin Literary Award-winning novel Carpentaria, published in 2006, as a way of exploring such representations in the contemporary era. This article is not trying to generate a new category for the field of Australian literary studies. Rather, it follows a seam within the Australian literary tradition that imagines generative forms of allegiance that may complicate existing conceptions of the Australian literary field.'

Source: Abstract.

'In a famous – perhaps too famous – proclamation, the late historian Patrick O’Farrell (1933–2003) declared that the ‘distinctive Australian identity was not born in the bush, nor at Anzac Cove: these were merely situations for its expression. No; it was born in Irishness protesting against the extremes of Englishness’ (O’Farrell 12). There has been a tradition of thinking about the Irish in Australia as the grit in the oyster, a recalcitrant internal other that allows Australia to emerge as a national pearl distinct from Britain. Yet, arguably, the separatism-assimilation binary, and the presumptions about nation-building upon which it is built, has not received sufficient critical treatment in recent decades as theories of diaspora, settler colonialism and cultural encounter have developed. Historiography about the Irish in Australia, over which O’Farrell’s presence still dominates, has ebbed in recent years as the attention has turned to Indigenous histories and to the waves of migration that have occurred since the Second World War.[^1] The fractious yet formative role of the Irish presence has tended to be papered over by terms like ‘Anglo-Celtic’ or ‘British’ Australia. Indeed, if Noel Ignatieff told the story of ‘how the Irish became white’ in the United States, perhaps in Australia the equivalent narrative is ‘how the Irish became British’, an identification which, as Elizabeth Malcolm recently pointed out, is remarkably ill-fitting: ‘Catholic Irish people do not usually consider themselves British and nor do most British people think of the Irish as British either. Australian usage of the category “British” to include the Catholic Irish is unusual’ (Malcolm 201).'

Source: Abstract.

'This article proposes a reading of Alexis Wright’s epic novel Carpentaria that focuses on the mine and its impacts as central to any understanding of the novel. Carpentaria offers a stark portrayal of how resource extraction is intimately linked with both colonisation and capitalism and is sustained through state-sanctioned violence and nationalist ideologies. This article explores the dichotomy between Normal Phantom, who views mining as just another phenomenon in the vast expanse of time, and his son Will, who fights the mine on the understanding that it is an unprecedented threat to the survival of the Waanyi people and their Country. Although I suggest that this wider debate, and the forms of agency it represents, remains unresolved in the novel, I conclude with a meditation on the critically neglected character of Kevin who complicates the novel’s uneasy resolution. In the light of ongoing debates about the Adani mine, Carpentaria is more relevant than ever.' (Publication abstract)

'Liliana Zavaglia’s White Apology and Apologia: Australian Novels of Reconciliation uses the trope of the double movement of apology and apologia to analyse a number of recent, culturally significant novels of reconciliation—determined interventions of literary activism—by white (liberal) Australian authors: two of Alex Miller’s novels—Journey to the Stone Country (2002) and Landscape of Farewell (2002); Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth (2004); Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005); and Gail Jones’ Sorry (2007). Zavaglia’s analysis is book-ended by two non-literary texts, the Mabo Judgement of 1992 and Kevin Rudd’s 2008 ‘Apology to the Stolen Generations in 2008,’ representing the two key events that flank the publication of these novels.' (Introduction)

'This article explores the cultural work of the Townsville-based Murri (Indigenous) Book Club. Although a growing body of research relates to book clubs in Britain and the US, little work has been done in the Australian context on what Marilyn Poole has called, ‘one of the largest bodies of community participation in the arts in Australia’ (280). The work that has been done, moreover, suggests that book clubs are an overwhelmingly white phenomenon, through which members ‘maintain their currency as literate citizens through group discussion’. But what of an Indigenous book club and its concerns? This article asserts that the Murri book club challenges traditional book club expectations through its very different relationship to cultures of books and reading. In doing so, the Murri book club has taken a white, middle-class practice and reshaped it for its own purposes: decolonizing the book club as a social, cultural and political institution. By examining the origins of the book club, its approach to books and the lives of some of its members, this article also suggests that the Murri book club challenges expectations about Indigenous professionals and offers insight into the complex ways in which Indigenous professionals negotiate their identities and their relationships with other readers, through communal literary networks.' (Publication abstract)

'Many of the articles in this issue of Journal of Australian Studies draw upon oral history and other qualitative methodologies. This process of listening carefully to the stories people tell about their lives is one of the most important ways an interdisciplinary journal such as this contributes to sharing ideas and histories that help us make sense of our worlds. Often these approaches accompany a reimagining of traditional historical practice.' (Introduction)

'An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including young women of Australia, Indigenous music, and a book review of "Dreams of Speaking".' (Publication abstract)

'This article scrutinises Alex Miller’s Landscape of Farewell (2007) through the lens of massacre. It explores the troubling implications of the novel’s sustained analogy between the generational effects for Indigenous Australian perpetrators of a massacre and the children of Nazis, and questions the novel’s capacity to contribute to reconciliation, in spite of drawing upon many of reconciliation’s key tropes. Drawing on the insights of comparative Holocaust studies, this article unpacks the novel’s representation of massacre and genocide, and the subtle comparison between Indigenous belonging to country and Nazi attachment to national space. Finally, through the work of Dominick LaCapra, it scrutinises the obfuscatory representation of the perpetrator, and the novel’s seeming projection of a form of perpetrator guilt onto the Indigenous subject.' (Publication abstract)

'Kate Grenville's The Secret River (2005) has been the subject of considerable controversy. Although the novel was awarded numerous prizes and was well received in the press, it was overwhelmingly criticized by historians and literary critics.' The historians are concerned that readers will confuse history and fiction; the critics are concerned that readers will empathize with the central character, thus ameliorating white guilt. Yet The Secret River has become a popular teaching text in universities, both in Australia and the United States. Given that the controversy has been largely confined to Australia, we are interested in considering why the novel is such a popular choice in literature courses in the United States and what this popularity tells us about the novel, the transnational dimension of literary studies of Australia, and pedagogical practices more generally. To that end, this essay draws on interviews with four United States academics who have taught The Secret River to consider the different issues it raises as a teaching text and what purposes it might serve as an Australian novel in a literature course in the United States. One of our most interesting findings is that it is precisely the qualities of the novel that trouble historical and literary scholars that make it such a compelling teaching text, enabling teachers to launch their students into the midst of ongoing unresolved debates.' (Introduction)