Cirrus@Austlit

'The following article explores the importance of fantasy as an important literary form. I specifically focus on the social function of fantasy genre texts produced in the Australian context to address the following key questions. First, is there such a thing as Australian fantasy? And second, what are the ethical considerations and issues around the use of Aboriginal and European mythic systems to provide non-indigenous writers with their material for creating fantasy worlds?' (Publication abstract)

'Indigenous-Australian fiction has experimented with subgenres of the Fantastic in various ways to secure an empowering location from which to address post/colonial dispossession. In the mid-1990s, the Australian writer and critic Mudrooroo, formerly known as Colin Johnson, proposed Maban Reality as a genre denomination for fiction which introduces the reader to the powerful and empowering universe of the Aboriginal maban or shaman, also known as the Dreaming. Mudrooroo’s coining of Maban Reality was a way of establishing an Australian variant of Magic Realism which defied a European epistemology of the universe, engaging and enabling Dreamtime spirituality as a solid pillar of Aboriginal reality. Mudrooroo had already experimented with a postcolonial reversal of the Gothic, a dark version of the Fantastic, in the first of his Tasmanian quintet, Dr Wooreddy’s Prescription for Enduring the Ending of the World (1983), but left its gloomy resignation to a dire Indigenous fate under colonial rule behind for the upbeat Master of the Ghost Dreaming (1993). Yet, as the result of a deep personal crisis—believed not to have an Aboriginal bloodline, in the mid-1990s he was barred from the tribal affiliation he had long claimed—Mudrooroo resorted to the gloominess of the postcolonial Gothic again in a vampire trilogy to reflect on the devastating impact of colonisation on Australian identity at large. This essay comments on the ways in which he has reflected on the present state of Australianness by rewriting Bram Stoker’s Dracula.' (Publication abstract)

'This article revisit’s the work of Mudrooroo in a new and timely framework of globalisation. I argue that Mudrooroo’s Master of the Ghost Dreaming series comprises a globalisation narrative. The series performs a transmutation of the conventional postcolonial narrative in which the forces of colonialism are made known and subverted. It identifies a novel power within the Australian landscape. This new power, personified by the vampire Amelia Fraser, is more dangerous even than the white colonisers. Whereas colonial forces operate through bounded Orientalist discourses of self/other, civilised/uncivilised, white/black, Amelia’s vampiric domination operates through, and is sustained by, a practice of uncontainability. Mudrooroo’s vampire has previously been read as a metaphor for white predatorial colonialism. However, I propose that Mudrooroo’s vampire Amelia is more adequately understood as the epitome of boundless cultural contagion. I consider that when thus reassessed within a global rather than a postcolonial framework, the Master of the Ghost Dreaming series provides an imaginative account of Australia’s emergence as a space of (cultural) contamination. This space corrupts and collapses discourses of authenticity and purity, thereby engendering radically new visions of being-in-the-world as informed by multivalent experiential entanglements. Through a fusion of fantastic genres that interweaves maban, mythic, and European gothic modes, the series explores the Australian landscape as a site defined by (cultural) contagion.' (Publication abstract)

'Fantasy is the ability of the imagination to visualize and textualize non-existent worlds as real. It is an escape to an imaginary present or past, but often expresses direct criticism of the real world or moral issues. The relation between fantasy literature and myth, the fairytale, and legends is highly complex. Is fantasy and the fantastic just the strange and unknown, and what is its purpose? Is it only imaginary worlds that can be defined as such and what is the role of the reader/listener in interpreting these texts as fantasy? This article will discuss what we mean by fantasy literature in relation to a recent collection of novellas, Legends of Australian Fantasy, their use of myth and its literary expression.' (Publication abstract)

'The Glitch is a six-part television series first aired on the Australian public broadcast network, the ABC, in July 2015. My interest is in ways that the series reflects certain aspects of Australian culture and history and, in particular, how inclusive the series has been in representing Indigenous Australian ways of seeing this history. The Glitch — set in a fictional Australian outback town where a number of residents who have lived and died there return from the dead — holds great potential for critiquing the cultural and perceptual frameworks that have created what popular culture often describes as ‘quintessential Australianness.’ Narrative genres that have a particular relevance in framing Australian identity within a postcolonial context are also important to my examination. They provide a way to explore the aesthetics of identity in the play between reality and unreality where an Australian Gothic sense of the uncanny is contrasted with the subversive way Magic Realism places the extraordinary within the same realm of the possible as the ordinary everyday event. This aligns with contemporary analyses of Australian Indigenous narratives where Indigenous perceptions of reality question a Western hegemonic view of what is magic and what is real and highlights the cultural origins of both. It is the mix of the mysterious and the mundane and the play between reality and fantasy that has enormous potential in The Glitch. However, as I also discovered, maintaining the magic and the real in such a delicate and continuous balance is no easy task.