Kelly Palmer Kelly Palmer i(10252487 works by)
Gender: Female
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Works By

Preview all
1 Lost in Space : Gold Coast Characters Wandering Home(less) Kelly Palmer , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: Queensland Review , December vol. 27 no. 2 2020; (p. 181-200)
1 Jenga, Kafka, and the Triumph Of Academic Capitalism : A Taxonomy of Scholars and Their COVID Capital Kate Cantrell , Kelly Palmer , 2020 single work essay
— Appears in: Axon : Creative Explorations , December vol. 10 no. 2 2020; 'As universities around Australia sever entire schools and faculties, others face collapse entirely. An over-dependence on international revenue and an unhappy marriage with the federal government had many universities already feeling some discomfort before COVID-19 exacerbated the pain. Whether universities rapidly decline, or languish and recover, they will undoubtedly see more violent restructuring as they transition into the recovery and renewal phase. In the meantime, the absence of any tangible assistance from the government, combined with mostly short-sighted cost reduction strategies, mean that a sector-wide crisis has now been left to individual universities to manage alone. As Teresa Tija et al. explain, ‘The immediate response of Australian universities was to defer capital works spending, reduce non-salary expenditure, scale back the use of casual and fixed-term staff, and introduce other short-term measures’ (2020: 3). These emergency surgeries, which in many cases have been performed without anaesthesia, reveal that universities need a more innovative ethical strategy for triaging and treating the many systemic disorders that the virus has not only aggravated but also exposed. As several academics have already observed, Australian universities were sick before the pandemic (Kunkler 2020; Zaglas 2020). Indeed, the commodification and destruction of ‘all the collective institutions capable of counteracting the effects of the infernal machine’ (Bourdieu 1998: 4) ensures that those commodified most — that is, the precariat — can do little to save the university from its self-cannibalising tendencies.' (Introduction)
1 The Beach as (Hu)man Limit in Gold Coast Narrative Fiction Kelly Palmer , 2018 single work criticism
— Appears in: Queensland Review , June vol. 25 no. 1 2018; (p. 149-162)

'Gold Coast beaches oscillate in the cultural imagination between everyday reality and a tourist's paradise of ‘sun, surf and sex’ (Winchester and Everett 2000: 59). While these narratives of selfhood and becoming, egalitarianism and sexual liberation punctuate the media, Gold Coast literary fictions instead reveal the beach as a site of danger, wholly personifying the unknown. Within Amy Barker's Omega Park, Melissa Lucashenko's Steam Pigs, Georgia Savage's The House Tibet and Matthew Condon's Usher and A Night at the Pink Poodle, the beach is a ‘masculine’ space for testing the limit of the coastline and one's own capacity for survival. This article undertakes a close textual analysis of these novels and surveys other Gold Coast fictions alongside spatial analysis of the Gold Coast coastline. These fictions suggest that the Gold Coast is not simply a holiday world or ‘Crime Capital’ in the cultural imagination, but a mythic space with violent memories, opening out onto an infinite horizon of conflict and estrangement.'

Source: Abstract.
1 Anthrax Kelly Palmer , 2016 single work short story
— Appears in: Voiceworks , Winter no. 104 2016; (p. 29-35)

'Annie and Russ are flattening scrunched wrapping paper over the carpet when their mum tells them there is anthrax in the sky and soon everyone will be dead. Russ lets go of his new Matchbox car. Annie scratches at a freckle that might be dirt...' (Publication abstract)
1 Highways Kelly Palmer , 2014 single work short story
— Appears in: SWAMP , September no. 15 2014;
1 Missed Connection Kelly Palmer , 2014 single work short story
— Appears in: SWAMP , September no. 15 2014;
X