Cirrus@Austlit

'In this article, I reflect on my creation of a digital map that plots locations from David Malouf's fiction and non-fiction. I consider the vestiges of David Malouf's past — particularly his grandparents' fruit shop and its relationship to his spiritual home at 12 Edmondstone Street — and I demonstrate how Malouf's words leave traces of his experience at these locations. Recognition of these traces requires alertness to the ways in which the past is communicated through historical registers, maps and literature. Our recognition is enhanced through a deliberate evocation of the past in our own experience of the city. My map, ‘David Malouf's Brisbane’, helps this to occur.'  (Publication abstract)

'This article offers the fullest discussion to date of the career, achievements and writing of Associate Professor Frederick Walter Robinson, one of the founders of the English program at the University of Queensland and a major figure in Brisbane and Queensland cultural life from the 1920s to the 1960s. Robinson's career is considered in the context of the development of English as a university and school discipline, the intellectual and cultural life of Brisbane and the University of Queensland, and national cultural developments during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Through his university teaching and vigorous participation in many cultural and educational groups within and outside the university, Robinson was a highly influential figure — particularly in his pioneering work in teaching, documenting and researching Australian literature, developing the Queensland school curriculum in English and championing the importance of Aboriginal anthropology. The article makes use of unpublished material in Robinson's extensive papers in the Fryer Library, and suggests that a true estimation of Robinson's achievements has been hindered by the fact that so much of his work remains unpublished.' (Publication abstract)

'When Aubrey Mellor returned to Brisbane in 1988 to become the second artistic director of Queensland Theatre Company (QTC), the company had been under the direction of a British-born and trained director since its formation in 1969. QTC was part of the national state theatre company network established as a result of postwar cultural planning. The network was charged with promoting national drama and producing theatre to a high artistic standard, but this objective imposed very specific constraints around the companies' programming. This was particularly observable at QTC: the company had been culturally and geographically distant from the New Wave movement that emerged in Sydney and Melbourne between 1968 and 1981. Mellor brought his experience of working in key institutions during this movement to QTC where he pursued a personal mission to develop Australian playwriting. During his five-year leadership he transitioned the artistic identity of the company to a more contemporary artistic framework.'  (Publication abstract)

'Mt Tamborine is a crucial location for Judith Wright's poetry, and for the development of her thought. She wrote the majority of her poetry collections while living on the mountain from 1948–75; it was there that she came face to face with the complexities of Australian ecologies and colonial histories. While her earlier poems from this period reflect a concerted, anti-colonial desire to separate the world of Tamborine from her European inheritance and perspective, by the early 1970s her work becomes preoccupied with symbiotic relationships between her body, her house and garden, and the surrounding landscape. This turn reflects broader shifts in thought in the mid-twentieth century, where notions of separation and precision were being problematised by the emerging field of quantum mechanics.'  (Publication abstract)

'The public discussion about Australia’s military past seems to be getting increasingly histrionic every year. In the hands of our politicians, who apparently have an innate understanding of the power of the military story to promote self-serving nationalism, our dominant war narrative is about a little country’s unbounded male courage and sacrifice. Indeed, we are almost always told about the men, the ‘Diggers’, who are held aloft as the archetype of the faultless Antipodean hero. Coerced to the surface are tales about young, white men from idyllic country towns who, when the whistle blows, blindly throw themselves over the top. Thankfully, a handful of historians and fiction writers are starting to explore different war narratives.' (Introduction)