AustLit

'The paper's "core" is the "secret life" of two Australians who worked for brief periods in intelligence and transmuted aspects of their experience in stories they subsequently told. Herbert Dyce Murphy's depiction of himself as "lady spy" in Europe in the early 1900s came to influence Australia's premier novelist Patrick White in the characterisation of his homosexual protagonist in White's novel The Twyborn Affair (1979). For Dyce Murphy and White, as for W. H. Auden and others, the image of the spy held imaginative appeal as a way of projecting the necessary disguises, subterfuges and possibilities that a life of secrecy entailed.' (278)

'Setting out with an anecdote/parable the critic explores of the relation/dialogue with the land of Australia as seen by its time-honoured inhabitants, the Aborigines, and its later conquerors, the Australians of European descent - arguing that the Aborigines' way of living in it and loving it instead of treating it as property, in Cixous' terms, a "feminine" approach as opposed to a "masculine" one, can teach the latter-day Australians a new ecology, and enable them to learn the natural rhythms of the land, and possibly achieve the Utopia of a harmonious intertwining of man and nature undisturbed by the ideology of profit.' (279)

'The focus is on the representations of indigenous cultures and customs in Katharine Susannah Prichard's short fiction (1929-1959) and in Sia Figiel's short story cycle Where We Once Belonged (1996). If the white Australian writer's narratives interpret the Aboriginal perspective, Samoan Sia Figiel, instead, tells her stories from the point of view of her own people. The paper aims at investigating the different narrative modes and emotional approaches of two writers, removed in place and time, prompted by diverse, but converging, reasons to denounce the effects of white colonization on native peoples. Prichard's commitment to socialism and realist writing determined her passionate involvement in the Aboriginal cause and her dealing with the problematic issues of exploitation and power structures. On the other hand, Figiel's indigenous voice, modulated through the typically South Pacific structure of su'ifefiloi, conveys a composite oral heritage meant to contrast western cultural impositions, and to assert the natives' right to tell their own stories in their own words.' (283)

'An in-depth analysis of the archetypal and metaphysical connection in David Malouf's Typewriter Music, between word, rhythm and imagination as manifestation of Being - or the Goddess, the Spiritual energy manifested in the universe. The use of the word, as always in Malouf, shows how the power of imagination embodied in the sound and rhythm of small everyday things, opens up a whole transcendent universe to the reader. Language in Malouf is a multifaceted, sensuous and tentacular medium that originates from a deep contact between things and peoples. Malouf's language gives voice, form and body to what is immaterial, to the spirit inherent in matter.' (283)