Cirrus@Austlit

'Australia has produced many post-disaster novels since the 1980s, our landscape and sense of global isolation inspiring long lists of environmental and political crises. While this literature provokes considerable work from ecocritical and postcolonial perspectives, the representation or use of disability in post-disaster narratives is less studied. This essay undertakes crip readings of a range of Australian young adult novels published since the 1980s, including Isobelle Carmody’s long running Obernewtyn chronicles (1986-2015) and Ambelin Kwaymullina’s Tribe sequence, particularly The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (2012) and The Foretelling of Georgie Spider (2015).'(Publication abstract)

Also reviews:

On the Edge of Gone by Corinne Duyvis

The Good Hawk by Joseph Elliott

'What am I doing?

'Writing while crip is complicated.

'Not the act itself, not always. My hands work most of the time, and I have access to screen readers and dictation software. But writing crip is messy and awkward and bodied and mine, because no ‘experience of disability is universal’ (Kafer 2013, 34), no matter how much anyone wants it to be.' (Introduction)

The narrator describes her experiences with spastic diplegia and cerebral palsy: the unsolicited questions and pity, the condescending love of her father, and the plain insults of young children that she ultimately prefers.