Cirrus@Austlit

Show notes

• Anita recorded this interview on International Women’s Day 2017. Directly after this interview, she gave the Hyllus Marra Memorial Lecture at La Trobe University.
• Anita cites Helen Garner’s The Children's Bach, Kate Grenville’s Lilian's Story, Christina Stead’s The Man Who Loved Children, Elizabeth Jolley’s The Well, and Anne Summer’s Damned Whores and God's Police : The Colonization of Women in Australia as influences.
• There is a difference between academic and non-fiction histories and the histories that can be communicated through storytelling, and Anita cites Alexis Wright’s Carpentaria, as a prime example.
• Anita quotes Ruby Langford Ginibi, who famously told the editors of her book Don't Take Your Love to Town, ‘Do not gubbarise my text’.
• BlackWords : Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Writers and Storytellers is a part of AustLit : The Australian Literature Resource, and is a database that records information about the lives and works of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writers and storytellers and the literary cultures and traditions that formed and influenced them.
• Anita refers to the First Nations Australia Writers Network and the Black and Write! program as indicators of the changing place Indigenous writers hold in the Australian literary landscape. She also mentions Indigenous writers, Jared Thomas, Bruce Pascoe, Nakkiah Lui, Kim Scott, Leah Purcell, Tony Birch, Ali Cobby Eckermann, Melissa Lucashenko and Ellen Van Neerven.
• Anita recommends Ashley Hay’s The Railwayman's Wife and Pamela Hart’s The Soldier’s Wife as great contemporary Australian women’s fiction, and cites Alex Miller’s Journey to the Stone Country and Jacqui Wright’s Red Dirt Talking as examples of writing that demonstrates great respect for place and people.
• Finally, Kath Walker’s (known after 1988 as Oodgeroo Noonuccal) We Are Going : Poems is the book Anita would save if her house was burning down.