AustLit

West-Sooby puzzles over this French-Australian writer who chose to focus on the life and culture of his adopted country while continuing to express himself (almost exclusively) in French, and apparently for a French readership. He notes the problem that Wenz's writing can only really connect with a reader of French who is familiar with the myths and realities of Australian bush experience.

Hosking compares the life stories of two Aboriginal women raised at Colebrook home in South Australia, noting the different ways in which they perceived their removal from their families, and the differences in the public reception of their stories.

This 'article takes this powerful and resonant historical drama [Holy Day] as its focus in exploring the continuity of an Australian cultural depiction of womanhood in the representation of white women's role in colonialism' (p.50).

Noting the effect of ethnography in 'incarcerating' oral cultures, and the effect of travel writing where writers have fashioned themselves as amateur anthropologists, the author examines Chatwin's perceptions of Indigenous people in The Songlines, seeing a misfit between the living, dynamic culture Chatwin encountered and the pristine pre-contact culture of his preconceptions.

The author notes that The Moated Grange appears to be in part a writing out of Martin's grief on the death of her loved younger brother, Alick, and sees striking parallels and intertwinings with Tennyson's poem 'In Memoriam', as well as with Alick's diaries which Martin treasured and re-read over the years.

'The Sentimental Bloke has been a significant story in Australian cultural history, beginning as a poem, and becoming two films, a stage play, a ballet, and a musical; and there have been versions for television, gramophone and radio.' Butterss examines how the poem 'might have operated through its audience in 1915, and how Raymond Longford's 1919 silent film and Frank Thring's 1932 talkie might have worked in altered economic and cultural circumstances.'

Through 'Port Phillip Night' Hillman attempts to unravel 'the transitional performance, the oscillating movement between [Webb's] visions of diaspora, the Holocaust, and his dissatifaction with an Australian "newness".'

The author explores the fusing of Greek tradition and an Australian context in the poetry of the Greek Australian poet Dimitras Tsoulis.

The author explores Australian creative writing about East Timor from the early 1940s, and notes the effect of twenty-five years of Indonesian rule in largely preventing creative writers from imaginative engagement and encounters with Timorese culture.

Bennett discusses the ways in which the Balmain writers Moorhouse, Wilding and Viidikas each in their own way expressed the changing lifestyles and expectations of their time.

In the work of Lily Brett, and Evelyn Crawford, Breyley sees writers from two different diasporas (Jewish and Baarkanji), and writing in two different forms, but each imagining the songs and languages of her ancestors, both known and unknown, and their resonance in the author's own worlds.

Healy explores the adaptation of novels to film, and the processes this involves of translation and interpretation. She focuses on The Sound of One Hand Clapping, where both novel and film were written by the author at much the same time, with the translation being something of a dialogical process.

Williams sees fiction as a means of enhancing and understanding landscape, and explores the way that the landscape, being integral to the novel's plot and character, 'speaks' to the reader in The Salt of Broken Tears.

The author observes that Cameron's portrayal of Australian social, political and aesthetic life in his novels forces us to ask the question "how far 'past the post' is post-colonial in this country?"

Petrescu interviews three Australian literary figures selected for inclusion in the Romanian Literary magazine, Vatra, and discusses issues involved in the translation of poetry.