AustLit

In his first days as Prime Minister, John Curtin presented himself to the press as a self-styled intellectual who loved sport and relaxing, when he could, with a book, beach walk, game of cards or fossick in the garden. He also revealed that he enjoyed poetry so much that he held to a Sunday night poetry ritual. Curtin was Australia’s third wartime Prime Minister, Labor’s eighth Prime Minister, and the first Prime Minister from a Western Australian electorate.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Four Oceans, Toby Davidson's second collection, confirms his reputation as one of the most expansive and radical voices in the emerging generation of Australian poets. The scale and scope of the works are deliberately ambitious, often testing the limits of what a single poem can reveal through multiple readings. This collection follows the poet's transitions from Western to Eastern Australia and overseas through finely-wrought, if occasionally feral, long verse sequences and experiments in form.

'Yet these are not escapist poems; they know 'escape cannot be a constant costume' and instead confront the ghosts of Australia's past. They look inward as well as out, forward as well as back, with a gritty resolve, empathy and wry humour. Four Oceans is a poetry collection which bears stark witness to the present moment and unsparingly asks how we got here.' (Publication summary)

'It was a pleasant surprise to hear of the publication of Robert Harris’ The Gang of One: Selected Poems, edited by Judith Beveridge. Harris (1951-93) is an Australian poet of the highest order. He is also a curmudgeon, a contrarian, a nature lover, a working-class Romantic, a navy recruit who detested nationalism, a lyrical memoirist, a historical dramatist and one of Australia’s finest religious poets.'  (Introduction)

'One way to witness the futility of defining the contemporary is to read someone attempting it twenty years back. Geoff Page's A Readers Guide to Contemporary Australian Poetry (1995) opts, after some vacillations ("does it include last year, last decade or even the last three decades?") to locate it in the poets of the late 60s, "whether they were later considered conservative or radical"—Tranter, Forbes, Adamson, Murray, Lehmann, Gray (1-2). While Page finds it "hard to think of any woman born between 1940 and 1950 who has rivalled the impact of most of the male poets cited so far", Jan Owen (b. 1940), Jennifer Rankin (1941), Joanne Burns (1945), Jennifer Maiden (1949) all are given entries of roughly the same length (8). The critical and commercial success of the slightly younger Dorothy Porter (b.1954) proved a little too contemporary for Page, with The Monkey's Mask reduced to "the verse detective novel she is now working on", even if, four lines below, his own bibliography gives the title and its publication date of 1994—the year prior (228). While the "general loosening up" caused by the "Woodstock generation", paperbacks and live performance has proven fruitful, Page concedes that the majority of his sixty-four chosen poets are no longer writing, with only twenty-four remaining active, the rest "lost to journalism, academia, early death, arts administration, the novel and the counter-culture of northern New South Wales" (2-3)...' (Introduction)

'In 2015 [author website] was launched by literature, geography, media and culture researchers [withheld]. It combines field research with Google Maps technology to reveal, for the first time, the spread of old and new commemorative sites of Australian literature in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. Previous maps, such as Monument Australia and the Cultural Atlas of Australia, have not included sites of literary commemoration. [author website] contributes to an emergent field of international scholarship within the humanities interested space, place and the geo and digital humanities.  The project provides a fresh basis for comparative scholarship with international literary maps and placemaking – including, for example, Franco Moretti’s Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (1998) to David Cooper et al’s Literary Mapping in the Digital Age (2016). '   (Publication abstract) 

Author's note: i.m. Lucas North

'This article considers literary mapping as an instance of the contemporary construction of space through digital networked technology. Digital cartography – mapping with the means of digital technology, internet and GPS technologies – represents space as a virtual layering of information. The digital cartography project Words in Space is discussed as a case study of digital literary mapping. Analysis of the data contained in this literary map reveals significant aspects of literary commemoration in Australia.' (Publication abstract)

'This special issue of New Scholar originates from a 2013 conference of the same name held at Macquarie University, convened by the Macquarie University English Department. The conference explicitly sought to examine trends, manifestations and solidifications in Australian writing and modes of analysis which might reveal both new research frontiers and new scholars pursuing twenty-first century approaches to movement, temporality, spatiality, canonicity and

the cross-cultural transference of values and identities. As the conference progressed, the focus on signposting or predicting future Australian literary trends and representations began to be superseded by the contested spaces of ‘the road,’ particularly as a space of contested readings and contests between ways of reading. The word ‘road’ itself etymologically invites this, and the Call for Papers included a reminder of its Old English root rād, with its parallel meanings ‘expedition,’ ‘raid’ and later an ‘open way between two places’ as conducive to postcolonial and transnational considerations. The road has often meant a vital, torrid testing ground for Australian self-definition and annihilation, and as guest editors we were particularly impressed with how the essays to follow took this trope in fiercely independent directions. ' (Author's introduction)