Cirrus@Austlit

From the welcome:

AustLit first began the digital monograph project with the goal of combining contemporary practices in scholarly publishing with the disruptive ethos of fast developing fields such as the Digital Humanities. The monograph form provided us with ideal sandbox for marrying the high quality of scholarship produced by sustained thought, investigation, and inquiry, with the extreme readability of contemporary digital platforms. As such, our digital monographs incorporate various aspects of digital literacy that we hope will complement and build upon this research and text by Professor Philip Mead, Chair of Australian Literature at the University of Western Australia.

Go directly to the welcome.

From the introduction:

This critical introduction is structured around the periods of Tasmanian cultural history: the deep time of Indigenous or Palawa Tasmania (Trowenna) and its survival into the present; the first decades of British settlement from 1803 to 1854 (the end of transportation); the second period of colonial history from 1855 to Federation, beginning with the change of the colony’s name from Van Diemen’s Land to Tasmania; the twentieth century, and the present. It also provides a thematic guide to the Tasmania of the mind, or Tasmanian writing as a distinctive literary imaginary, and as an identifiable regional subset of both Australian literature and the world literature of islands.

Go directly to the critical introduction.

From the essay:

Whatever the unknowable historical reality of the incident, it bears the typical marks of European encounters with the new world: the readiness for violence, wonder at the possibility of an undiscovered human population, the imperative of economic exploitation, fragmentary, tantalising accounts of cultural alterity. If those people of the Pydairrerme band were performing song cycles, they were part of a culture with a 40 000-year human history and with continuities, however faint, in the present-day culture of Tasmanian Aboriginals.

Go directly to 'Continuing Aboriginal Writing and Indigenous History'.

From the essay:

Amongst the many other poems on topical subjects, elegiac laments and satiric commentary, the poems about landscape and place in these early publications often evince a strong sense of identification, a sentimental pride in native birth rather than nostalgia for the old country. This array of writing supports James Boyce's argument that the experience of early British settlers of Van Diemen’s Land, as compared to that of mainland New South Wales, was ‘greatly at variance with the standard opening of the national story’ (5). They were islanders in a place apart.

Go directly to 'Place'.

From the essay:

Van Diemen’s Land was a notably literary prison island. Convict ballads set in the colony contribute to that prevalent response to the new land as a hell on earth – an antipodean underworld of punishment – eternal, in effect, for the many condemned to exile for the terms of their natural lives. In addition to the laments about exile, the bitterness about hard labour, the corruption and injustice of society, ballads like ‘Van Diemen's Land’ warn the listener against breaking the law or radical politics.

Go directly to 'Prison Island'.

From the essay:

This is the Tasmania that Frank Hurley re-creates in his film Isle of Many Waters, with its fox-hunters, Huon Valley apple trees and Romantic ruins at Port Arthur. Tasmania as a Little England is also the paradigm for Kathleen Graves’s account of genteel pioneering and landscape design in Midlands Tasmania, in Tasmanian Pastoral, which includes a chapter about the Midland Hunt where wombats are converted into badgers. The persistence of the Little England trope is also evident in touristic and immigration discourse that advertised Tasmania as the ‘sanatorium of the south’ and in twentieth-century Tasmanian fiction, with some contemporary adjustments, for example, in Isabel Dick’s popular fiction (Huon Belle [1930], Wild Orchard [1945]) and in Nan Chauncy’s small farm Tasmania (in They Found a Cave, Tiger in the Bush, and Tangara).

Go directly to 'Little England'.

From the essay:

The mythemes of the Tasmanian Gothic revival were always there, as Patrick White’s cultural antennae sensed more than a decade earlier. In his 1976 obituary for Cynthia Nolan (née Reed), White referred to her unhappy Tasmanian childhood at the country estate of Mount Pleasant, near Prospect, ‘surrounded by what one sees as conventional Tasmanian Gothic gloom.’ White’s version of Nolan’s Tasmanian childhood is a good example of the propensity for the Gothic mode to distort perception and memory.

Go directly to 'Tasmanian Gothic and Its Discontents'.

From the essay:

The evidence of the literature of Tasmania is that these themes are approachable only in limited ways such as, for example, historiographic debate. Tom Haydon’s 1978 documentary The Last Tasmanian and its remake in the following year are instructive in this context. The kinds of institutional and narrative problems raised by Haydon’s film – closed social systems and the loss of material culture; colonising archaeological knowledge – still circulate in very similar rhetoric and positionality to nearly 40 years ago (see Sykes; Laurajane Smith).

Go directly to 'Extinction Island'.

From the essay:

Once again, Twain was alert to a deep structure within Tasmanian culture inaugurated at its founding: it’s radical ambivalence, its doubleness, its bipolar mentality. Twain’s response of Tasmania as both heaven and hell is all the more percipient given that he had no first-hand experience of the binary geography of the island. He only encountered the ‘paradise’ of the Hobart-Derwent settlement, having sailed down the eastern side of the island, a sunny, fertile extension of Wilson’s Promontory. Twain didn’t see the western side, a wild, Southern Ocean-lashed wilderness of sparse or abandoned settlements – he saw Wineglass Bay rather than Hells Gates.

Go directly to 'A 'Barren Place, and Fertile'.

From the essay:

In their landmark anthology, Effects of Light : The Poetry of Tasmania (1985) Vivian Smith and Margaret Scott consciously defined the phylogenetics of the island’s poetry for the first time. If islands are worlds, they are ambivalent worlds because they’re also home to endemic species. Smith and Scott identified what they called a ‘quintessential’ quality to Tasmania, noting also its ambivalence at the same time.

Go directly to 'Island Poetry'.

From the essay:

As we know from Marcus Clarke, the other valuable and generative resource from Tasmania’s past is its private and public collections of unpublished papers and records. For example, Tasmania’s convict records, whatever the veracity of stories about cavalier or censoring treatment in earlier decades, are now part of the UNESCO ‘Memory of the World Register.’ So from very early on Tasmania was self-consciously aware of its own history and of the value of its material records and tangible heritage.

Go directly to 'Re-purposing the Archive'.

From the essay:

One of the most important aspects of the literature of Tasmania is its unique history of literary production, including the part it has played in the history of the book and print in Australia. The important relation between the press of the early colony and its cultural and political development is well recognised in early Tasmanian print histories.

Go directly to 'Tasmanian Print and Book History, Colonial Readership, and Authorship.

From the conclusion:

At the beginning of this introduction there are three short descriptions of Tasmanian writing lives, at the end I would like to point to three different examples of Tasmanian authorship: Jessie Couvreur (‘Tasma’), the brother and sister writing duo Roy and Hilda Bridges, and the internationally renowned novelist Richard Flanagan. All are recognised Tasmanian authors but their styles of engagement with the institutions of authorship and the role of Tasmania as place, as history, and as a site of narratives plays very different roles in how they made, and make, themselves as authors.

Go directly to the conclusion.

Further reading, references, and acknowledgements from Professor Philip Mead.

Go directly to Relevant Bibliographical Work, Library and Archival Resources.