'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)
'This paper investigates the affective labour done by, specifically, native species images in Australian poetry, using Judith Wright's bird poems, and various poems about kangaroos as example. It uses the anthropological term, "deep hanging out", borrowed from an article about fashion models, to extend the idea of affective labour, and to measure poems' attentions to birds and animals, and their relation to iconising as the work of nationalism. It is concerned with cultural capital, and Canberra, and the human empire.' (Publication abstract)
'This paper investigates the affective labour done by, specifically, native species images in Australian poetry, using Judith Wright's bird poems, and various poems about kangaroos as example. It uses the anthropological term, "deep hanging out", borrowed from an article about fashion models, to extend the idea of affective labour, and to measure poems' attentions to birds and animals, and their relation to iconising as the work of nationalism. It is concerned with cultural capital, and Canberra, and the human empire.' (Publication abstract)