Cirrus@Austlit

'Celebrating the diverse languages of Australia's First Peoples, this book presents stories told by elders in eighteen languages from around the continent, and explores their patterns of meaning.

'The stories recount the experiences of the tellers and histories of their communities, from tales of anti-colonial resistance to origin stories of the Dreaming. The book aims to make the languages accessible and engaging through the voices of the elders, while building readers' knowledge about language and language learning. It opens with some basic language knowledge for reading the stories. Each chapter then begins with the cultural and historical contexts of the stories, which are first previewed in English translation, then presented sentence-by-sentence, setting out the original sounds and wordings, glossed with plain English. Extracts are selected to illustrate patterns of meanings that are characteristic of each language. The final chapter sums up the various meaning patterns the stories use, and interprets their evolution in the light of First Peoples' deep histories, as recorded by archaeology and traditional knowledge.

The book will be useful for language learning programs in communities and schools, for researchers of language and language teaching, and for any reader with an interest in the languages and cultures of Australia's First Peoples.' (Publication summary)

'J. M. Coetzee – novelist, essayist, public intellectual, and Nobel Laureate in Literature (2003) – is widely recognized as one of the towering literary figures of the last half century. With chapters written by leading and emerging scholars from across the world, The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee offers the most comprehensive available exploration of the variety, range and significance of his work.

'The volume covers a wealth of topics, including:

'· The full span of Coetzee's work from his poetry to his essays and major fiction, including Waiting for the Barbarians, Disgrace and the Jesus novels
· Biographical details and archival approaches
· Coetzee's sources and influences, including engagements with Modernism, South African, Australian, Russian and Latin American literatures
· Interdisciplinary perspectives, including on visual cultures, music, philosophy, computational systems and translation.

'The Bloomsbury Handbook to J. M. Coetzee provides indispensable scholarly perspectives, covers emerging debates and maps the future direction of Coetzee studies.' (Publication summary)

Released in 1986, Hunters and Collectors' album Human Frailty is one of the most important Australian albums of the last two decades of the twentieth century. It was pivotal in the group's career and marked the group's move into pub rock. It is unashamedly concerned with love and desire. The album challenged traditional understandings of Australian masculinity while playing music to predominantly male audiences. No other Australian group would have dared, or indeed been able, to get their audience to roar 'You don't make me feel like a woman anymore,' the culminating line off Hunan Frailty's first track, and the first single taken from the album, “Say Goodbye”. The second track on the album, “Throw Your Arms Around Me” has become an Australian standard, an anthem sung drunkenly more by women than men, in pubs, at weddings and similar occasions. Human Frailty is an album that transcended the critical categories of its time.

Source: Publisher's blurb

Ed Kuepper's history as a rock pioneer with The Saints and Laughing Clowns means that his albums of the early 1990s represent a remapping of the singer-songwriter concept. His classic Honey Steel's Gold shares a looseness with blues and folk recordings of the 1940s and 1950s, capturing performances that take detours, stretch and contract, wax and wane, such as the album's hit “The Way I Made You Feel”. Honey Steel's Gold is a landscape to be immersed in, to get lost in. It provides a space not where questions are answered but where we might stop and get a drink; an environment that provides solace, but not platitudes; where we can share a wry smile about the downsides of the human condition rather than attempt the illusion of blocking them out completely.

This study incorporates a consideration of Kuepper's iconoclastic career, at odds with the music industry and the grunge era into which the album was released. Beyond the apparent facts, though, there is interpretation, speculation, and attempts to meet Honey Steel's Gold on its own terms in some imaginary place.

Source: Publisher's blurb

'The Australian Film Revival: 70s, 80s, and Beyond explores the matrix of forces - artistic, cultural, economic, political, governmental, and ideological - that gave rise to, shaped, and sustained this remarkable film movement. This engaging new study brings fresh perspectives, insights, and innovative approaches to a variety of films from a diversity of filmmakers. Areas of focus include the complex and contentious subjects of masculinity, femininity and feminism, the maternal, as well as the Indigenous road film and the protean Australian gothic. During the formative years of the revival, Australian films seemed to emerge from out of the blue in terms of global film history, with many features including Picnic at Hanging Rock (l975), Caddie (l976), The Last Wave (l977), The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (l978), and My Brilliant Career (l979) receiving international distribution and enthusiastic critical acclaim with strong box office results. By the time the film revival was in full swing, not only did Australian audiences flock to theaters to see "homegrown" films, but the quantity of Australian films on overseas screens was so high that ardent critics declared this outpouring an Australian "New Wave." The eyes of the world had turned to a compelling and largely unknown culture.'

'Spanning a range of artists and genres from Australian Indigenous artists to Maori and Pasifika artists, from Aotearoa/New Zealand noise music to Australian rock, and including music from Papua and other Pacific islands, 33 1/3 Oceania offers exciting accounts of albums that illustrate the wide range of music made in the Oceania region.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

After a string of commercial disappointments, in 1986 Australian rock band The Church were simultaneously dropped by Warner Brothers in the US and EMI in Australasia. The future looked bleak. Seemingly from nowhere, their next record, Starfish, became an unlikely global hit. Its alluring and pensive lead single, 'Under the Milky Way', stood in stark contrast to the synth pop and hair metal dominating the 1980s. A high watermark of intelligent rock, Starfish musically anticipated alternative revolutions to come. Yet in making Starfish, The Church struggled with their internal contradictions. Seeking both commercial and artistic success, they were seduced by fame and drugs but cynical towards the music industry. Domiciled in Australia but with a European literary worldview, they relocated to Los Angeles to record under strained circumstances in the heart of the West Coast hit machine.

This book traces the story of Starfish, its background, composition, production and reception. To the task, Gibson brings an unusual perspective as both a musician and a geographer. Drawing upon four decades of media coverage as well as fresh interviews between the author and band members, this book delves into the mysteries of this mercurial classic, tracing both its slippery cultural geography and its sumptuous songcraft. Situating Starfish in time and space, Gibson transports the reader to a key album and moment in popular music history when the structure and politics of the record industry was set to forever change.

Source: Publisher's blurb

Regurgitator’s second full-length album, Unit (1997), was produced in a DIY warehouse studio at a time when this was unusual for a major label band. The album went three times Platinum in Australia and won five esteemed ARIA Awards in 1998, including Album of the Year. The album’s success is indicative of a particular point in time in popular music trends, when the world was recovering from the impact of grunge and post-grunge bands.

Regurgitator’s subversive attitude toward pop music, punk aesthetic, unique lyrical narratives and an ironic view on their own creative product made their music potent in an alternative market defying the prevailing music trends. Unit and Regurgitator were the focus of divisive critical reviews, yet they continue to rank highly as a quintessentially Australian band. This volume situates the development of Unit amongst the DIY culture of a politically charged Brisbane scene, and breaks down the album through the lens of recording and songwriting processes. This book outlines the impact of Regurgitator’s music locally and globally, by discussing what made Unit a success at the peak of the alternative music genre.

Source: Publisher's blurb

(Publication summary)

'The album examined in this book transformed the singer John Farnham from a faded teen pop star into the most popular solo rock performer in Australia, in a career that has lasted for more than 30 years. Whispering Jack remains the top-selling album by an Australian artist in Australia, and constitutes the turning point in Farnham's bid to achieve credibility as an adult contemporary musician. The first single from the album, 'You're the Voice,' has achieved such iconic status that it is routinely referred to as Australia's unofficial national anthem. The book examines the album, its context and that history in order to recover a crucial conjuncture in the development of Australian rock and popular music, one that has previously been ignored in Australian popular music studies.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Bringing together decolonial, Romantic and global literature perspectives, Transcultural Ecocriticism explores innovative new directions for the field of environmental literary studies. By examining these literatures across a range of geographical locations and historical periods – from Romantic period travel writing to Chinese science fiction and Aboriginal Australian poetry – the book makes a compelling case for the need for ecocriticism to competently translate between Indigenous and non-Indigenous, planetary and local, and contemporary and pre-modern perspectives. Leading scholars from Australasia and North America explore links between Indigenous knowledges, Romanticism, globalisation, avant-garde poetics and critical theory in order to chart tensions as well as affinities between these discourses in a variety of genres of environmental representation, including science fiction, poetry, colonial natural history and oral narrative.' (Publication summary)

'This book shows how creative writing gives voice to the drama and nuance of religious experience in a way that is rarely captured by sermons, reports, and the minutes of church meetings. The author explores the history of religious Dissent and Evangelicalism in Australia through a variety of literary responses to landscape, from both men and women, lay and ordained.

'The book explores transnational themes, along with themes of migration and travel across the Australian continent. The author gives insight into the literature of Protestant Dissent, concerned as it is with travel, belonging, and the intersection of national and religious identity. Much of the writing is situated on the road: a soldier returning from the Great War, a child on a lone adventure, a night-time journey through urban slums; all of these are in some way dependent on the theme of “walking with Jesus” as the Holy Land travelogues make explicit.

'God in the Landscape draws the links between landscape, literature, and spirituality with imagination and insight and is an important contribution to the historical study of religion and the environment.'(Publication summary)

An Anthology of Australian Albums offers an overview of Australian popular music through the lens of significant, yet sometimes overlooked, Australian albums. Chapters explore the unique qualities of each album within a broader history of Australian popular music. Artists covered range from the older and non-mainstream yet influential, such as the Missing Links, Wendy Saddington and the Coloured Balls, to those who have achieved very recent success (Courtney Barnett, Dami Im and Flume) and whose work contributes to international pop music (Sia), to the more exploratory or experimental (Curse ov Dialect and A.B. Original). Collectively the albums and artists covered contribute to a view of Australian popular music through the non-canonical, emphasizing albums by women, non-white artists and Indigenous artists, and expanding the focus to include genres outside of rock including hip hop, black metal and country.

Source: Publisher's blurb

'In this major full-career reassessment of J. M. Coetzee, Anthony Uhlmann illuminates the intellectual and philosophical interests that drive Coetzee's writing.

'Whilst looking at Coetzee's writing career, from his dissertation through to The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), and interpreting running themes and scenarios, style, and evolving attitudes to form and genre, Uhlmann also offers revealing glimpses, informed by archival research, of Coetzee's writing process. Among the main themes that Uhlmann draws out from Coetzee's writing, and which remain highly relevant today, are the ideas that there is truth in fiction, or that fiction can provide valuable understandings of real world problems, and there are also fictions of the truth: that we are surrounded, in our everyday lives, with stories we tell ourselves which we wish to believe are true.

'J. M. Coetzee: Truth, Meaning, Fiction offers a revealing new account of one of our most important contemporary writers.' (Introduction)

Gender inequality is universally understood to be a continued problem in the music industry. This volume presents research that uses an industry-based approach to examine why this gender imbalance has proven so hard to shift, and explores strategies that are being adopted to try and bring about meaningful change in terms of women and gender diverse people establishing ongoing careers in music.

The book focuses on three key areas: music education; case studies that explore practices in the music industry; and activist spaces. Sitting at the intersection between musical production, the creative industries and gender politics, this volume brings together research that considers the gender politics of the music industry itself. It takes a global approach to these issues, and incorporates a range of genres and theoretical approaches. At a time when more attention than ever is being paid to gender and music, this volume presents cutting edge research that contributes to current debates and offers insights into possible solutions for the future.

'Leading and emerging, early career scholars in Classical Reception Studies come together in this volume to explore the under-represented area of the Australasian Classical Tradition. They interrogate the interactions between Mediterranean Antiquity and the antipodean worlds of New Zealand and Australia through the lenses of literature, film, theatre and fine art.

'Of interest to scholars across the globe who research the influence of antiquity on modern literature, film, theatre and fine art, this volume fills a decisive gap in the literature by bringing antipodean research into the spotlight. Following a contextual introduction to the field, the six parts of the volume explore the latest research on subjects that range from the Lord of the Rings and Xena: Warrior Princess franchises to important artists such as Sidney Nolan and local authors whose work offers opportunities for cross-cultural and interdisciplinary analysis with well-known Western authors and artists.'  (Publication summary)

'How does a writer approach a novel about a real person?

'In this new collection of interviews, authors such as Emma Donoghue, David Ebershoff, David Lodge, Colum McCann, Colm Tóibín, and Olga Tokarczuk sit down with literary scholars to discuss the relationship of history, truth, and fiction. Taken together, these conversations clarify how the biographical novel encourages cross-cultural dialogue, promotes new ways of thinking about history, politics, and social justice, and allows us to journey into the interior world of influential and remarkable people.' (Publication summary)

'Popular Modernism and Its Legacies reconfigures modernist studies to investigate how modernist concepts, figures, and aesthetics continue to play essential--though often undetected--roles across an array of contemporary works, genres, and mediums.

'Featuring both established and emerging scholars, each of the book's three sections offers a distinct perspective on popular modernism. The first section considers popular modernism in periods historically associated with the movement, discovering hidden connections between traditional forms of modernist literature and popular culture. The second section traces modernist genealogies from the past to the contemporary era, ultimately revealing that immensely popular contemporary works, artists, and genres continue to engage and thereby renew modernist aesthetics and values. The final section moves into the 21st century, discovering how popular works invoke modernist techniques, texts, and artists to explore social and existential quandaries in the contemporary world.

'Concluding with an afterword from noted scholar Faye Hammill, Popular Modernism and Its Legacies reshapes the study of modernism and provides new perspectives on important works at the center of our cultural imagination.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This book provides a thoroughly researched biography of the naval career of Matthew Flinders, with particular emphasis on his importance for the maritime discovery of Australia. Sailing in the wake of the 18th-century voyages of exploration by Captain Cook and others, Flinders was the first naval commander to circumnavigate Australia's coastline. He contributed more to the mapping and naming of places in Australia than virtually any other single person. His voyage to Australia on H.M.S. Investigator expanded the scope of imperial, geographical and scientific knowledge. This biography places Flinders's career within the context of Pacific exploration and the early white settlement of Australia. Flinders's connections with other explorers, his use of patronage, the dissemination of his findings, and his posthumous reputation are also discussed in what is an important new scholarly work in the field.' (Publication summary)