Cirrus@Austlit

'Dorothy Blewett's story, 'This Girl Came to Our School' broadcast on the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) in 1949 and published here in print for the first time, is a more complex work that it seems on first reading. Into its mere 1,600 words are packed themes of colonisation and its collapse, racism and prejudice, guerrilla warfare, constructed white privilege with its perception of the threat of miscegenation, and the enduring impacts of schoolgirl bullying on both the bullied and the bully. The story, written in the late 1940s, is a psychological study of the narrator's dawning recognition that her racist behaviour has, in part, fed into the creation of a revolutionary engaged in a battle against European culture and its colonial enterprise.

'The story was submitted to an ABC short story competition in 1949. Although it didn't win, the story was one of four commended submissions purchased by the ABC and broadcast around Australia in July and August 1949. The story was broadcast in Sydney, Darwin, Adelaide and Melbourne and is likely to have been broadcast across the entire ABC network in Australia.' (Abstract)

'There was girl came to our boarding school whose home was in Java. Her name was Josepha - Josepha de Vries. She was small with delicate wrists and ankles; her eyes, soft and dark, were mostly downcast above high cheekbones and her full mouth drooped pathetically. The bloom on her skin was neither gold nor olive, but something approaching both, and her hair was black with mahogany lights in its deep waves.' (Introduction)

'This paper explores the numerous ways in which domestic space is represented a a site of excess, consumption and desire in texts from different ends of the cultural spectrum improvement culture, contemporary home improvement culture, in particular renovation programs such as The Block (2004-), as well as examining a selection of poems by contemporary Australian female poets. I examine the development of house renovation as a cultural phenomenon in Australia, particularly in Australian reality television, and consider some of the uncanny devices used to construct a fantasy of completion and wholeness that is implicit in most popular home improvement texts. By fixing the house, these programs suggest to viewers, the inhabitant becomes a better person, better parent, better consumer (insofar as their purchases reflect particular middle-class tastes and styles). Whereas there is a great deal of critical and creative work on the overlapping paradigms of architecture and narrative, "poetry, in contrast , is a space that does not permit ready entry' (Brewster 143).' (Abstract)

' I've never been to France, but it pops up in my dreams every now and then, like an old friend back in town for a few days. I'll wake up in the morning with the details a little hazy, but with one clear thought: I dreamt I was in France last night.' (Introduction)