AustLit

'These poems emerged slowly, and through aleatory conversations between Shé and Jen, in which they identified points of connection in and beyond poetry. Both poets are interested in experiment, and in women poets’ voices; both have lived in Western Australia and been captivated by the light, the space, and the vastness of that state; and both poets have spent a fair bit of time in mourning and in responding to the loss of loved ones. They are also interested in movement in creative and scholarly terms. For Shé, the elemental world is a motivating force; for Jen, it’s travel—hence the title of this joint publication.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Aquamorphia: Falling for Water is a mythological, psychological and elemental poetic history of water in three deeply entrancing parts.

Each section of this exciting and tumultuous water narrative takes the reader for a ride on different streams of intoxicating, daring and at times playful water worlds.

From ancient Greek creation myths to the Australian beach, Aquamorphia moves symphonically, praising the maternal and generative qualities of fluidity since the Big Bang, or splitting of the Cosmic Egg. The verse is afloat with metaphors that flesh out the minutiae of the aquatic landscapes that sustain life.' (Publisher's summary)

'This paper draws on Indigenous Australian relationships with water as evidenced in the particular cross-cultural and cross-literary collaboration ‘Sustainable Futures’ between the Widjabul/Bundjalung Nations of New South Wales, Australia, and Lismore local government managed water authority, Rous Water. It also references the ecological dialogue with traditional owners put forward by Jessica Weir and the Murray Lower Darling Rivers Indigenous Nations (Victoria). In both cases non-Indigenes from economics and politics, socio-cultural geography as well as local activist citizens have been invited into dialogue, and into particular Indigenous knowledge systems, to co-create water management strategies for Australia's troubled river systems. The motivation behind such cross-cultural dialogue is hope for a meaningful future of sustainability in which human rights and notions of reverence are imbricated.

The current water crisis, as articulated by Maude Barlow (Senior Advisor on Water to the President of The United Nations General Assembly), provides acute provocation for a radical re-thinking of approaches to water. This paper advances ‘other-wise’ notions of literacy, pedagogy, and epistemology to enable such re-thinking. The water crisis questions the legacy that a western lack of reverence for water, borne of narrow history making, means in current times. This inquiry is predicated on a critical need for understanding the greater properties and meanings of water beyond commodification frameworks, towards socio-cultural and spiritual knowledge and notions of reverence. To that end it locates water firstly as its ‘own self’, as part of a ‘sacred geography’ as Deborah Bird Rose suggests, and further as a pedagogical and geographical meeting place between different territories and ontologies.' (Publisher's summary)

'The focus of this paper is writerly and academic women primarily from the Greek/Australian Diaspora, who relate experiences of love, loss, grief and ‘outside belonging’ in their academic and writerly work. The diasporic/transnational expe riences of Greek migrant women, provides fertile writing ground for people making the ‘new world’ of Australia home. This Australia, is a land already disturbed and haunted by a hostile tale of settlement, where its indigenous culture remains insufficiently valued and understood, let alone the habits and practices, grief ’s and longings of migrants and refugees. In contrast to Pierre Bourdieu’s fixed and stable notion of habitus, field and agency, Cultural theorist Elspeth Probyn talks about an ‘outside belonging’ felt by people who move between social, cultural, and geographic worlds. Australia is a land filled, it seems, with people located from, ‘outside belonging’, reconsidered here through writerly transnational exchange between Greece and Australia. With specific diegetic intention, this paper charts the journeys of these writers through the metaphor of a ship that goes both ways. Helen Nickas’ anthology Mother’s from the Edge (2006) narrates, through allegory, humour and grief, the experiences of Greek migrant women who have travelled to the ‘new world’ of Australia. Her more recent autobiography Athina and her Daughters: a memoir of two worlds (2009), unpacks this territory with intimate and historical detail. Beverley Farmer travels in the opposite direction to the new ‘old world’ of Greece. Her early writing as with Charmian Clift who precedes her, is doused in the harrowing, peppered with wit and metaphor, loss and longing, as she culturally navigates a foreign land. Such writing produces a textual and cultural richness that I argue could be better represented and dispersed in contemporary Australian literary (and cultural) studies.' (Author's abstract)

"The Navigational Tools of Desire and Exile."' Source: Libraries Australia and the author. (Sighted 19/03/2009).