Cirrus@Austlit

'In the Asia-Pacific region, literature is plurilingual. Even Australian literature is not necessarily written in English. There are several contemporary Australian authors who write in languages other than English and many who write in various Englishes. This article examines one such example by analysing the life writing of Catherine Rey. It focuses upon the self-reinvention that this French author performed by migrating to Australia in mid-life. Focusing on the first-person narrative Une femme en marche (2007) and drawing comparisons with self-reflexive essays by this author, the article teases out the contrasts between Rey’s representation of France and Australia as spaces for literary creation. It then interrogates how Rey reinvents herself through linguistic play within her life writing. Using theories of ‘translanguaging’, the article analyses the ways in which this author blends French and English to probe the gaps in languages, to nuance literary representation and to create new linguistic forms to express her self-narrative.' (Publication abstract)

'This paper analyses the memoirs of Australian writer Alice Pung in the contexts of her suburban Melbourne upbringing, her parents’ status as refugees, and Cambodia’s Pol Pot period. The author discusses the changed way Pung deals with the Pol Pot period from Unpolished Gem (2006) to Her Father’s Daughter (2011), and in particular the necessary disjointedness that is a consequence of the latter memoir’s more direct and deep focus on Pung’s father’s experiences during the Pol Pot period. The author concludes by locating Pung’s works, particularly Her Father’s Daughter, among various other memoirs of the Pol Pot period, including poet U Sam Oeur’s memoir, Crossing Three Wildernesses (2005). Placed among other memoirs of survival and loss, the author suggests, Pung brings a distinctive perspective as the child of a survivor of the Pol Pot period.'  (Publication abstract)

'Pacific War writings, especially memoirs by those who were involved as soldiers or prisoners of war, occupy a significant place in Australian literature. They have contributed to the creation of national stories and myths, constructing a collective memory of war for Australians.' (Publication abstract)

'Historians acknowledge that since the 1970s family history research has driven individuals to confront the silences within Australia’s colonial past, including ‘the convict stain’. However, little attention is given to how the practice has been used by the Stolen Generations to deal with the fracturing impact of ‘protectionist’ social policies on family and life histories. To explore this, I bring the concept of the intergenerational self into dialogue with ‘Paul’s Story’, a short memoir collected in Carmel Bird’s The Stolen Children: Their Stories (1998), and singer/songwriter Archie Roach’s testimony from the ABC Blackout television documentary ‘Best Kept Secret’ (1991). In these cases, the narrative continuity of family lines is severed. Faced with lost origins, the authors must reclaim an intergenerational self retrospectively through research and revision. The paper examines these cases in the context of an emerging focus on relational lives. It demonstrates how people write and tell family histories to rebuild an intergenerational identity in the wake of destructive colonial policies.'  (Publication abstract)

'This paper will examine the effects of exile in life writing practice. It will consider how things from the past can be used to evoke and revoke what James Wood termed ‘homelooseness’. It will draw on examples from my own creative practice, a family memoir written from Australia about people in and from the United Kingdom. The memoir is informed by things plucked from a loose and disordered family archive, which exists across both countries. It is driven by a need to locate my own life within its new context in the Asia-Pacific. In the paper I will use the work of W.G. Sebald and Penelope Lively to illustrate the rootlessness things provoke and resist; I will touch on the melancholy inspired by that feeling. As well as showing the reality of dislocation, things-from-the-past can be useful tools for life writers concerned with the past or engaged with the problem of trying to capture slippery, liminal states of being. The conflation of one place or time with another, as described by George Poulet when critiquing Marcel Proust, can be triggered briefly by objects.'  (Publication abstract)

'Through a hybrid memoir and non-fiction writing format, this essay explores the research and reconstruction of my father’s life: a patremoir project examining an encounter with a rescued family archive that revealed my father’s secret other life and a longing for ‘home’ unquenched by immigrant life in the ‘land of opportunities’. After twenty years of living in Australia, my Polish father, Antoni Jagielski, a WWII concentration camp survivor, decided to return ‘home’ to Poland, to his culture and to his other family. This work uses the lens of my father’s story and mine, to examine fractured families, separation, displacement, the transmission of intergenerational memory and the transnational history of post-1945 Australia. My research intervention, a field trip to Poland in 2013, unexpectedly uncovered a family archive consisting of letters, postcards, official documents and certificates, photos and material artefacts. Additional information about my father’s life has been gathered from archives in Auschwitz, Mauthausen/Gusen, the Polish Underground Movement Study Trust and the Polish Institute in London. This diversity of sources, typical for scholars in this part of the world researching immigrant family stories, has provided the fragments to make meaning of a life and the difficulties of post-war immigration to Australia.' (Publication abstract)

'Life writing scholars know Richard Freadman, a long-time professor of literature at Latrobe University in Melbourne, as one of the academics who have made Australia ‘the promised land of autobiography studies’ and as an author who has not hesitated to practice what he preaches about the importance of first-person writing. His monograph, Threads of Life: Autobiography and the Will examined how autobiographers have dealt with the philosophical problem of the freedom of the will and the ability of individuals to shape their own lives. Freadman personalised this issue in Shadow of Doubt: My Father and Myself , a memoir of his father, which centres on the question of how what Freadman sees as his father’s failure of will affected not only his parent’s life but his own. The seriousness of Freadman’s personal wrestling with the ethical issues posed by life writing, and especially writing about his own family members, was eloquently expressed in an essay, ‘Decent and Indecent: Writing My Father’s Life’, in Paul John Eakin’s edited volume The Ethics of Life Writing.'   (Introduction) 

'Gillian Whitlock's Postcolonial Life Narratives: Testimonial Transactions is a timely intervention in the field of postcolonial life writing. Packed with well-researched scholarship and structured in two parts, the book critically addresses some ‘enduring questions on the limits of humanity and humanitarianism, and the “ends” of testimony' (202) through the transaction of testimonial life narratives within a postcolonial discursive frame. Bringing into a productive dialogue between two dynamic fields of contemporary engagement, postcolonialism and life writing, the book ‘mark[s] out a field of postcolonial life writing' (1) exhibiting a significant import of scholarship from some key texts like Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson's Reading Autobiography, Kay Schaffer and Sidonie Smith's Human Rights and Narrated Lives, Margaretta Jolly's Encyclopedia of Life Writing, Bart Moore-Gilbert's Postcolonial Life-Writing, and Graham Huggan's edited Oxford Handbook of Postcolonial Studies. The book also works through some of the key ideas of thinkers like Franz Fanon, Robert Young, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Achille Mbembe, and Gayatri Spivak, among others. It thus attempts to capitalise on a cross-disciplinary dialogue and scholarship that has started to emerge recently in the critical work of feminist and postcolonial scholars around ‘de/colonising the subject', specifically the critique of what Marlene Kadar, Jeanne Perreault, and Linda Warley in their special issue introduction of the journal ARIEL call, ‘the “Western man” model of autobiography' (1), to accommodate and engage with many other contending genres of life narratives in diverse cultural locations. It is not surprising to witness such a critical move as the origin of autobiography is very often located in the European Enlightenment and the Enlightenment brand of humanism is associated with the ‘auto' of autobiography and its authority. Gillian Whitlock makes a very powerful observation here: ‘autobiography … is now generally reserved for a literary canon that privileges a specific Enlightenment archetype of selfhood: the rational, sovereign subject that is conceived as western, gendered male, and … racially white' (2–3). This critique of ‘“autobiography” as a fixed genre of reference’, as Smith and Watson maintain, has given way to ‘other popular genres of contemporary life narrative, including online forms and graphic memoir, testimonial writing and autoethnography, film and video, and installation art' (14).'  (Introduction)

'All the Beginnings opens with ink and fish, tattoos and peeling skin. With body. And assertion. Author and tattooist are turning a body into ‘something new, that is old, that is new’ (2). Beginnings and ends and new beginnings. The ink, the body, this text says: ‘I see you, and, I am here’ (3).' (Introduction)