AustLit

'Every year Grattan Institute compiles a list of essential reads for the PM. Here’s what it has recommended this time.'

'There are paintings one looks at, or perhaps into, and then there are paintings that one looks through—more like a window or portal. On my dining room wall there hangs such an artwork, a watercolour painted en plein air at Lake Pedder’s beach in the year before I was born. It takes me there, to the place in the dunes where Max Angus sat at his easel and mixed on his palette the dusky mauves and pinks of that legendary sand, and prepared the tiny quantity of smoky blue needed to depict the band of lake water on the horizon. It takes me also to that day in 1971 when Max Angus was painting in the hope that capturing the beauty before him might somehow contribute to its salvation.'  (Introduction)

'‘What’s in a name?’ Juliet asks herself while mooning around on her balcony, and the answer she comes up with could be roughly summarised thus: a name probably shouldn’t matter that much, but actually it does. Quite a bit.'  (Introduction)

'This is the story of a love song . . . And like any good love song, it has two parts.

'In Australia, Arie Johnson waits impatiently for classical pianist Diana Clare to return from a world tour, hopeful that after seven years together she'll finally agree to marry him.

'On her travels, Diana composes a song for Arie. It's the perfect way to express her love, knowing they'll spend their lives together . . . Won't they?

'Then late one night, her love song is overheard, and begins its own journey across the world.

'In Scotland, Evie Greenlees is drifting. It's been years since she left Australia with a backpack, a one-way ticket and a dream of becoming a poet. Now she spends her days making coffee and her nights serving beer. And she's not even sure whether the guy she lives with is really her boyfriend or just a flatmate.

'Then one day she hears an exquisite love song. One that will connect her to a man with a broken heart . . .' (Publication summary)

'In order to provide some context for the following excerpt from my novel-in-progress, “The House on Legs,” let me first share some thoughts about the reasons one might choose to reinvent Baba Yaga, the witch-crone of Russian and Slavic folk tales, as a wildlife warrior in Australia’s island state of Tasmania. Generally, it is accepted that Baba Yaga’s signature trait is her profound ambiguity. Straddling such binaries as good/evil, natural/supernatural, human/nonhuman, she is a character famous for her unpredictability. Should a heroine or hero approach her house on legs, she may help them in their quest. Or, she may attempt to eat them up. Contradiction is a key component of her reputation, and the same can be said of Tasmania, Australia’s island state, and also of that island’s wildlife icon, the Tasmanian devil.' (Introduction)

'Danielle Wood on pseudonyms and the divide between literary and commercial writing.'

'A highly adorable and addictive love story that explores whether "the stars" can or should be a guide through life and what happens when one woman tries to give "the stars" a little help. 

'When childhood sweethearts Justine (Sagittarius and serious skeptic) and Nick (Aquarius and true believer) randomly bump into each other as adults, a life-changing love affair seems inevitable. To Justine anyway. True, she hasn't seen Nick in thirteen years, one month and three weeks, but who's counting? She's pined after him all the same, and now that Nick lives in the same town, a struggling actor to her struggling magazine reporter, he'll surely realize his own unchanged feelings, take the reins and jump at the chance to rekindle their relationship. Right? Well, no. Nick, she learns, is an astrological devotee, and his decision-making, romantic and professional, is guided solely by the infallible horoscopes in his favourite magazine. The magazine Justine happens to work at. Perhaps the stars' guiding forces could use a little journalistic reimagining?

'It's only a few tweaks to the Aquarius column, just a little push to get him to realize they're meant for one another. It's nonsense in the first place, what could possibly happen? Aquarians everywhere are about to find out, when the doctored horoscopes, ostensibly published to steer Nick and Nick alone, end up reverberating in the lives of the column's devoted readers, showing the ripple effects of what can happen when one woman decides to take the horoscopes, and Fate itself, into her own hands.

'Spanning exactly one year, as the earth moves through all twelve stars signs, Star-Crossed is a delicious, intelligent and affecting love story about fate, chance and how we all navigate the kinds of choices that are hard to face alone.' (Publication summary)

'A handsome full-colour book pairing unique items from the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery with selections of original writing about the southern island.

'INDIGENOUS dispossession, a cruel penal history, gay-rights battles; exceptional landscapes, unusual wildlife, environmental activism; colonial architecture, arts and crafts, a thriving creative scene—all are part of the story of Tasmania. And they find their expression in the unparalleled collection of Hobart’s TMAG.

'In Island Story, Ralph Crane and Danielle Wood select almost sixty representative TMAG objects: from shell necklaces to a convict cowl, colonial scrimshaw to a thylacine pincushion, contemporary photography to a film star’s travelling case. Each is matched to texts old and new, by writers as diverse as Anthony Trollope, Marie Bjelke-Petersen, Helene Chung, Jim Everett, Heather Rose and Ben Walter.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'While Canadian scholar Lisa M Fiander argues that fairy tales are ‘everywhere’ in Australian fiction, this paper questions that assertion. It considers what it means for a fairy tale to be ‘in’ a work of contemporary fiction, and posits a classificatory system based on the vocabulary of contemporary music scholarship where a distinction is made between intertextuality that is stylistic and that which is strategic. Stylistic intertextuality is the adoption of features of a style or genre without reference to specific examples, while strategic intertexuality references specific prior works. 

'Two distinct approaches to strategic fairy-tale revision have emerged in Australian writing in recent decades. One approach, exemplified in works by writers including Kate Forsyth, Margo Lanagan and Juliet Marillier, leans towards the retelling of European fairy tales. Examples include Forsyth’s The Beast’s garden (‘Beauty and the Beast’), Lanagan’s Tender morsels (‘Snow White and Rose Red’) and Marillier’s short story ‘By bone-light’ (‘Vasilisa the Beautiful’). The other, more fractured, approach is exemplified in works by writers including Carmel Bird and Murray Bail, which do not retell fairy tales but instead echo them and allude to them.

'This paper proposes that recent Australian works that retell fairy tales are less likely to be set in a recognisably Australian context than are works which take a more fractured approach to fairy tale. It also explores the notion that, presently, transporting European fairy tales, whole, into an Australian setting, seems to be a troubling proposition for writers in a post-colonial settler society that is highly sensitised to, but still largely in denial about, its colonial past.' (Publication abstract)

'Dealing with a terrible loss at home and faced with unknown danger in the world of story, Tuesday McGillycuddy has to muster all her resources to survive her most challenging adventure yet.

'Winter has fallen in the world of story, and at Brown Street, Tuesday's typewriter lies silent. Far away in the Peppermint Forest, Vivienne Small fears that she will never again feel the touch of the sun.

'But when the mysterious Loddon appears in Vivienne's treehouse, he brings with him terrible danger. Without warning, Tuesday is swept up into the world of story as she has never seen it before. In this forbidding and unfamiliar place - and without her beloved dog Baxterr at her side - Tuesday becomes Loddon's captive. But who exactly is this strange boy? And will she find a way to defeat him?

'Blueberry Pancakes Forever will capture the hearts of everyone who is entranced by the power of story.' (Publication summary)

'Joan Wise made her fiction debut in the pages of Australia's Bulletin magazine in 1950. A poem of hers had earlier appeared in the same publication, but her arrival as a writer of prose was announced by a series of linked tales, "The Conquest of Emmie" (January), "Poison in the Furrow" (May), and "A Fence for Emma" (August). The stories are a subtly comic triptych about gender politics and hardscrabble bush-farming life in the remote Central Highlands district of Tasmania.' (Introduction)