Cirrus@Austlit

'This issue opens with JASAL’s second commissioned essay for the Copyright Agency’s Reading Australia project, aimed at producing scholarly essays around key works of Australian Literature for use by tertiary students and teachers. A.J. Carruthers has approached the selected text, Out of the Box: Contemporary Gay and Lesbian Poets, edited by Michael Farrell and Jill Jones, through a broad consideration of a range of anthologies of Australian poetry, and an examination of the nature and function of the poetry anthology more broadly. The essay conceives the project in formal and conceptual terms, while at the same time attending to the demands of particular poems and poets, producing a provocative essay that foregrounds the roles played by ‘inventive poetics . . . in the broader institution of poetry and its multiply-linked communities.’ It concludes speculatively with a sense of a poetic anthology informed by ‘material poetics,’ which might provide the capacity to ‘more deeply theorise shifting historical and formal tendencies in Australian poetry and poetics rather than being burdened with the task of representing a national literature.’ The issue also features the 2015 A.D. Hope prize-winning essay by Shaun Bell. The A.D. Hope judges’ citation commends Bell for bringing fresh attention to the oeuvre of Sumner Locke Elliot, through his innovative re-reading of the primal scene of an emergent writing self in Elliott’s fiction. Working from Lee Edelman’s concept of homographesis, Bell attends to Elliott’s various recastings and reconfigurations of this signature scene, both autobiographical and fictional, real and imagined. Bell argues that Elliott’s fiction rightly belongs neither to any narrowly conceived nationalist literary paradigm nor to the category of the middlebrow to which it is often consigned. Rather he wants us to see that its significance arises from Elliott’s homographetic negotiation of the writing self, and from his vivid illumination of a queer writer’s trials and tribulations in Sydney during the interwar years.' (Introduction)

'There has been a rich history of anthologising Australian poetry this far into the twenty-first century. This article claims that contemporary poetics, with a renewed focus on the recoprocal relation between cultural and linguistic inquiry, can rediscover alternative ways of reading the history of Australian avant-garde, inventive and experimental work. Considering several key anthologies published after the turn of last century, the article provides readings of both the frameworks the anthology-makers provide and the poems themselves, claiming that mark, trace and lexical segmentivities can already be read as social. It then proposes a new possibility for an experimental anthology that might bring these facets into lived praxis: the chrestomathy.' (Publication abstract)

'Like many mid-century authors, Sumner Locke-Elliott fled Australia for more welcoming shores. From his first novel Careful He Might Hear You (1963), Locke-Elliott laid the foundations for a fictional self-authorship that suffused his writing with biographic detail and themes of origin, place and time. Despite his long absence from Australia and his naturalisation as an American citizen, his final novel and fictional coming out in Fairyland (1990) returns readers to the homophobic Sydney of his childhood. This blurring of biographic and fictional detail within the representational space of childhood creates an embodied literary network that connects Australia of the 1930s & 1940s and New York of the 1980s & 1990s, merging literary corpus and authorial life. Taking up this sense of presence, absence and connection, I argue that Locke-Elliot’s representation of childhood is a nostalgic point of interface that generatively refigures his oeuvre as an embodied queer and transnational literary network.' (Publication abstract)

'This article reviews the illustration history of Australian periodicals to place modern illustrated short stories in this context.  It argues that illustrated periodicals drew on networks of etchers, engravers, printers, promoters, advertisers, authors, and artists that were globally distributed as well as locally contentrated.  As Victorian Studies have experienced a visual turn in the last decade, and as modern periodical studies have also gained momentum, this paper argues that the time is past due to consider Australian Literature in terms of its connections to visual print culture, especially in the peridocial scene. Of the several reasons this article offers to account for persistent oversights of this material in the Australian context, it explores the ways that modern magazines challenge existing paradigms of national literature because of their intensive investments in travel, mobility, and commercial culture. Yet, in their original contexts, illustrated short stories in modern Australian magazines that celebrated these values existed side-by-side with nationalist literature and national brands.' (Publication abstract)

'The poet Dora Wilcox lived and worked in a world of colonial and Australasian literary networks that created and encouraged her multiple national affiliations. As a New Zealander who moved to Australia, however, the influence of mid-century cultural nationalism did not allow her to retain a place in literary history because of her movement between New Zealand, Australia and Britain, her transnational identity and her gender. This paper examines contemporary evaluations of Wilcox to reconstruct the workings of the Tasman literary world within which she operated. The false dichotomies between writers who stayed and writers who left, and women’s and men’s writing, have led to an inaccurate picture of the opportunities available to writers outside the literary academy. Very few of the recent reassessments of early twentieth century literature have shown interest in writers’ transnational concerns, which explains why Wilcox still languishes in obscurity.' (Publication abstract)

'Carey's archives add a new facet to Carey’s public image as an Australian author. In principle, the archive is directed at posterity, defying the ephemeral nature of “personality” pieces about the writer, a phenomenon that Grahame Turner has discussed in terms of Carey’s active participation in accumulating recognition amounting to the construction of Carey’s author-persona as a “national celebrity” (136). My interest in this essay is to explore the ways that Carey’s archives contribute to our understanding of productive mechanisms of his celebrity. In doing so, I theorize the formation and the significance of Carey’s archives both as texts and objects. I argue that the archiving of Carey is energized by a collective investment by a body of cultural participants who have a stake in promoting the now ‘globalised’ author. This has ultimately resulted in relocalising the ‘corpus’ of the New York based writer back in Australia, and particularly in the State Library of Victoria in Melbourne. This archive has been regularly updated alongside Carey’s growing oeuvre. In this parallel literary space, however, Carey’s cultural agency continues to manipulate his public persona. '  (Publication abstract)

'In their introduction to the book Phantom Past, Indigenous Presence, Colleen E. Boyd and Coll Thrush recall the recurring nature of the ‘Indian burial ground’ (vii) cliché in popular culture. As Boyd and Thrush see it, the Aboriginal burial ground as the rationale for a piece of land being uncanny or haunted has become ‘a tried-and-true element of the cultural industry’ (vii). Boyd and Thrush argue that possessed, sacred Aboriginal territory or the ‘Indian uncanny’ (ix) remains one of the most common explanations for the supernatural attributes of a house or other physical site in texts produced in ‘settler colonies’ (Ashcroft 133) such as Australia, Canada, and the United States, ‘[w]hether . . . the haunted house down the dirt lane, the spectral woods behind the subdivision or the seemingly cursed stretch of highway up the canyon’ (Boyd vii).' (Introduction)

'This book’s title invites readers to respond to the life of the elder daughter of Vance and Nettie Palmer as one of sadness and struggle. Indeed, emotional deprivation and unrealised creativity are recurring themes. Yet a further dimension, that of heroism, emerges as the narrative reveals Aileen Palmer to have been a woman of exceptional courage, strength and intellectual gifts. Born on 6 April 1915, she joined the Communist Party of Australia at seventeen and for two yearsin her early twenties fought as an interpreter and hospital organiser for the British Medical Unit and the International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War. She later declared: ‘Spain stands out in my own life like a beacon-light’ (qtd. Martin 279). From 1940 to 1943 she continued the fight against fascism by serving as an ambulance driver in the London Blitz. A widely recognised outcome of World War II was a temporary loosening of gender restrictions in Western countries. Even so, Aileen succeeded in living out adventures and friendships—and in dealing with frightful realities—that were denied to most Australian girls and women of her generation. Despite the miseries and tumults that afflicted her after her return to Australia in September 1945, Aileen Palmer’s life should inspire as much celebration as regret.' (Introduction)

'A Frances Johnson is a poet, novelist, artist and teacher of creative writing. This book is the result of research she undertook as a PhD student at the University of Melbourne, where she is now the Head of Creative Writing in that University’s School of Culture and Communication. It took me a little while to apprehend the form of this book, because it was slightly novel to me. It is a study of the Australian ‘postcolonial novel’. What is meant by this is that bracket of Australian fiction written between the 1980s and the current moment (1989-2014, in fact) and which deals with the dire consequences that European colonisation had for Indigenous Australia. Johnson’s case studies are Kim Scott, Peter Carey, Kate Grenville, Matthew Kneale, Richard Flanagan, Rohan Wilson … and herself.'(Introduction)

'Few JASAL readers will be unfamiliar with Brigitta Olubas’s extensive scholarship on Shirley Hazzards life and work. In 2012, Olubas published the monograph Shirley Hazzard: Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist. That same year she convened a Hazzard symposium at the Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. Papers from that event were later collected in Shirley Hazzard: New Critical Essays (2014). Now, in We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected Essays, Olubas takes readers on a geographical, political and literary tour of Hazzard’s life and mind.' (Introduction)

'From Barthes to Foucault, declarations of the death of the author have been crucial in defetishizing the singular authority of a work’s originator as the guarantor of that text’s meaning. Writers from colonised backgrounds, however, have often worried about the erasure of identity and cultural specificity implicit in this nonetheless crucial caveat. Postcolonial theorists who have nuanced or challenged the claim of authorial death/absence include Edward Said in his Beginnings: Intention and Method and Édouard Glissant across multiple topoi within his oeuvre.i If the modernist author had to die to reopen the possibility of multiple interpretations, the Indigenous subject has often been absented in advance from any role in the interpretive paradigm surrounding their work. Aboriginal authors in Australia have been conscious of such limits of the ‘death of the author’ thesis for some time, but it seems that this past year heralded a new attention and reorientation in relation to this question. In her keynote, delivered at the opening of the 2015 ASAL Conference, held at UNSW Canberra, Melissa Lucashenko boldly stated: the ‘Aboriginal author is not dead.’ Non-Indigenous scholars of Aboriginal literature will, it seems, need to be increasingly self-conscious of the ethics of methodology today and it is into this situation that Anne Brewster’s new work inserts itself in a timely fashion.' (Introduction)

'It begins with an anecdote, related at third hand. David Crouch opens his incisive and intermittently exhilarating account of the colonial author, radical and agitator William Lane with Vance Palmer describing how, during ‘a sweltering summer in Brisbane,’ writers Sydney Jephcott and Francis Adams were startled by a ‘ghastly apparition’ on the ‘dusty roadway’ before them. Jephcott takes the limping figure for Mephistopheles. Adams hisses ‘”shut up! It’s Billy Lane”.’ For many in late colonial Australia, Lane was the Messiah rather than the Tempter. Crouch does not venture a biography. Lane is lightly sketched—club-footed, adamantly teetotal, fiercely industrious, geographically restless and—especially through his own weekly magazine the Boomerang—‘able to pour his ideas into the moral marrow of colonial print culture.’' (Introduction)