Cirrus@Austlit

'I met Veronica in 1988 on my first trip to Australia. I had admired her as an academic since my undergraduate days but had no idea what was in store for me once I met her. Over the decades we met in places across the world and in Spain and each meeting was unique, an intellectual uplift and more than often an absolute hoot when we travelled together. In paying tribute to Veronica I would like to write about some of the incredible and on one occasion hair-raising, trips we shared.'

Source: Abstract.

'The art of recreating cities imaginatively and the critical act of reading urban fiction involve processes of research and learning that often include encounters with specific cities and their dwellers, prompting reflection on the forms and ethics of such encounters. Whether carrying out historical research into the past or observation of the rapid transformation of contemporary cities, writers and critics often combine the acquisition of documentary and experiential knowledge of urban spaces. Taking two different categories of writing by Simone Lazaroo, on the one hand her texts on past relations between Singapore and Australia, and on the other her current stories on global cities after the Great Financial Crisis, we explore the processes of learning before and through representation, and the ethics of human interaction in the contact zone of the global urban where, increasingly, the world’s expelled have become street-dwellers.'

Source: Abstract.

'Christina Stead was one of the great Australian writers of the twentieth century. After a revived interest in her work in the 70s and 80s, Hazel Rowley’s Biography (1993) and Chris William’s Christina Stead: A Life of Letters (1989), as well as an issue of Southerly in 2003, Stead is in danger of being once again forgotten. Many of her texts, however, are relevant today as they express attitudes dominant in social media. It is perhaps fitting now in the twenty-first century that we evaluate how relevant her work still is in an age of transculturalism and globalization.

'We see in some of her texts the same dissatisfaction with politicians, politics and social life expressed in current political events such as Brexit and the Trump phenomenon.'

Source: Abstract.

'This article analyzes the transnational features of narratives between Galicia and Australia from the year 1519 to the Present-day. Sailors like Pedro Fernandez de Quiros and Luis Váez de Torres, who reached Australia in the sixteenth century, will be considered as the starting point of a cultural dialogue still going on in today’s literature not only as regards the geography of the continent but also in the collective imagination of the country. Other connections between these countries are also established by contemporary novelists such as Peter Carey, Sally Morgan and Murray Bail, who use Galician history and places, filtered through British sources, to address Australia and its present-day characters and decolonizing conflicts. Finally, the works of other authors such as Robert Graves and Félix Calvino, who also deal with this literary dialogue in their fiction, are explored.'

Source: Abstract.

'Veronica Brady, vigorous supporter of Aboriginal causes and deeply concerned with social-injustice issues, underlined that Anglo-Australians were to be excommunicated from the land until they would come to terms with it and its first peoples (in Jones 1997). Nearly twenty years after this statement was postulated, it is my purpose in this paper to look at the land from an Anglo-Australian and non-Indigenous Australian perspective in order to assess if Australian contemporary society has moved beyond what Brady considered a “super ego status” and reconciled to the presence not only of its Indigenous, but also its non-Indigenous others. To do so I will exemplify novels which are part of and influenced by the matrix of relations and social forces in which non-indigenous Australian writers are situated on, including Suneeta Peres da Costa’s Homework (1999) and Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel (2013).'

Source: Abstract.