AustLit

Les Murray offers blessings for this inaugural issue of Lemuria. He explains that his poem 'The Conversations' is the only one of his to mention lemurs 'those great-eyed denizens of Madagascar, which along with India and Sumatra formed part of the mythical continent of Lemuria' (4).

Ashcroft reads Patrick White's A Fringe of Leaves for its exploration of 'a different way of experiencing the sacred' (6).

Wilding reads the letters exchanged between Stead and Blake and concludes that they are 'important in redressing the misleading account of Christina perpetrated in the unsatisfactory biography of Stead by Hazel Rowley' (25).

Cathcart reads a range of 'Lemurian novels,' examining their 'uncomplicated optimism about the future of White Australia, their trust that the key to that future lay beneath the earth, in the Great Australian Basin, and their attempts to grapple with the deadly impact of colonisation on the Aborigines who resisted' (44).

Sharrad in this essay discusses a wide range of Australian fiction with attention to its negotiations with history. Sharrad says that the struggle of the writers he examines 'has been both to recover and reject history' (72-73). Through fiction, history is brought to life but 'lest we become trapped by the tyranny of the past, the writer has also to perform literary exorcisms that will free the future from the hauntings which currently still visit the Australian national present' (73).

Atherton's article incorporates readings from a range of Wallace-Crabbe's published work, as well as from 'The Serious Songs' which is to be published in 2007.