AustLit
Issue Details:
First known date:
2004...
vol.
11
no.
2
December
2004
of
Queensland Review
est. 1994
Queensland Review
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description
'Thea Astley - the great Queensland novelist, who died in August 2004 at the age of 78 - famously expounded the notion that Queensland is quite unlike anywhere else. Even when familiar cultural elements are present, she argued, they are combined so incongruously here as to produce an utterly distinctive environment:
It's all in the antitheses. The contrasts. The contradictions. Queensland means living in townships called Dingo and Banana and Gunpowder. Means country pubs with nvelve-foot ceilings and sagging floors, pub which, ,while bending gently and sadly sideways, still keep up the starched white table-cloths, the heavy duty silver, the typed menu. Means folk singers like Thel and Rick whom I once followed through to Clermont on that lecture-tour while they cleaned up culturally ahead of me; but it also meant listening to the now extinct State Queensland String Quartet playing the Nigger Quartet in my fourth-class room among the sticks of chalk, the tattered textbooks~ means pushing our way through some rainforest drive laced with wait-a-while to hear the Lark Ascending, or more suitably, the Symphonie Fantastique crashing through the last of the banana thickets.
Many of Astley's novels and short stories explore the ways in which Queensland enters and shapes her characters' bodies and minds. Astley's biting humour, her vivid evocations of excess in the tropics, and her elusive search for spiritual . authenticity in a stolen land are - at least in part - products of the quirky, infuriating, but also deeply creative environment in which she grew up.' (Editorial)
Notes
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Contents indexed selectively.
Contents
* Contents derived from the 2004 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
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Transformative Moments : An Interview with Janette Turner Hospital,
Belinda McKay
(interviewer),
single work
interview
(p. 1-10)'Janette Turner Hospital is the author of eight novels, four collections of short stories, a novella published only in French, and a crime thriller under the pseudonym Alex Juniper. Her work has been published in 20 countries, and in 12 languages other than English. She is the recipient of a number of overseas literary awards, and both Griffith University (in 1996) and the University of Queensland (in 2003) have conferred honorary doctorates upon her. In 2003 she won the Queensland Premier's Literary Award for Best Fiction Book for her most recent novel, Due Preparations for the Plague, and the Patrick White Award for Lifetime Literary Achievement.' (Extract)
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The 'Psychic Space' of Queensland in the Work of Janette Turner Hospital,
single work
criticism
(p. 11-23)'In January 1967 Janette Turner Hospital left Queensland for Boston. She was unpublished. 25 years of age, and very much the product of a loving but fundamentalist childhood that she understood as the ‘source of all comfort and security, but also the source of all harm’. She has called America. India. Canada and France ‘home’ and has also frequently taught in other European countries. Although she has two adult children who have made their lives in the United States and Canada, her parents and three younger brothers remain in Brisbane, so she returns regularly to sustain family ties.' (Extract)
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James Devaney and the Brisbane Resistance to Modernism,
single work
criticism
(p. 25-39)'This grainy old photograph from The Courier-Mail of 2 April 1971, under the headline ‘The Three Ancients’, shows three grey-haired men — James Devaney (identified as being 80 years old), Frank Francis (75), and Robert S. Byrnes (71) — standing around a middle-aged woman who sits at a Victorian-style desk in front of a photograph of the Queen. The caption explains this puzzling image. As an April Fool's Day gesture, the self-styled ‘three ancients’, all former presidents of the Queensland Branch of the Federation of Australian Writers (FAW(Q)), are singing a song called ‘Three Ex-P's’ (to the tune of ‘Three Blind Mice’) to the current president, Maureen Freer. The three men, we are assured, ‘have made a large contribution to the cultural activities of Queensland’.' (Extract)
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Literary Sidelights on Wartime Brisbane,
single work
criticism
(p. 41-57)'There have been several anecdotal accounts of the literary scene in Brisbane during World War II and numerous references in more general works. In 2000, Queensland Review published some reminiscences of writers Estelle Runcie Pinney, Don Munro, Val Vallis and David Rowbotham, under the title ‘Writing in Brisbane during the Second World War’. Some of the more important general works include Judith Wright's ‘Brisbane in Wartime’, Lynne Strahan's history of Meanjin and Judith Armstrong's biographical work on the Christesens, The Christesen Romance. My interest in this subject arose from editing Judith Wright's autobiography, Half a Lifetime, published in 1999, and recently in editing, with her daughter, letters between Judith Wright and Jack McKinney which were mainly written in Brisbane in the later years of the war and the immediate postwar period. Initially my purpose was to gather information to elucidate people or events mentioned in these writings, but my interest widened to embrace more general information about the period. My research led me to the conclusion that Meanjin and its editor Clem Christesen were catalysts for many of the literary activities in Brisbane during World War II, not just among resident Australians, but among troops temporarily stationed in Brisbane — particularly Americans, whom Christesen cultivated and published. This article records a few glimpses of literary life in Brisbane, and incidentally in the rest of the country, during a period described by Patrick Buckridge as never having been researched ‘in enough detail’.' (Extract)
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[Review] Wildflowing: The Life and Places of Kathleen McArthur,
single work
review
— Review of Wildflowering : The Life and Places of Kathleen McArthur 2004 single work biography ;(p. 109-110)'Kathleen McArthur was born in 1915, the same year as her cousin Mary Durack and her lifelong friend Judith Wright. The three women are also linked by the way that their work gave expression to their deeply felt connection to place. Kathleen and Judith became friends in the early 1950s as their shared passion for "wildflowrering" grew into a shared commitment to conservation. Margaret Somerville s book is about the \way Kathleen McArthur inhabited places - her childhood home at Coorparoo, and later Caloundra, Currimundi, Cooloola and the Pumicestone Passage. Her connection to these places brought her self into being, and her representations of them raised public awareness of their beauty and significance.' (Introduction) -
[Review] My Island Home : A Torres Strait Memoir,
single work
review
— Review of My Island Home : A Torres Strait Memoir 2003 single work autobiography ;(p. 111-112)'John Singe has contributed to the scholarly literature on the islands~ peoples and cultures of Torres Strait in his previous books: Torres Strait: People and History (1979 and 1988); Culture in Change: Torres Strait History" in Photographs (1988); and Among Islands (1993). These books canvassed the history, multicultural diversity and dynamics of a unique area of Australia, once a frontier outpost but no," fully integrated into the economy, politics and concerns of mainland Australia. The Torres Strait region is scattered with many islands, 14 of,which are inhabited. They are home to approximately 6000 Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians and migrants.' (Introduction)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
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