'This special double issue of Coolabah, numbers 24&25, was developed from selected presentations at Reimagining Australia: Encounter, Recognition, Responsibility, the International Australian Studies Association (InASA) Conference 2016, hosted by the Centre for Human Rights Education, Curtin University, and held in Fremantle, Western Australia, on 7-9 December. The double issue addresses the urgent need for Australia to be reimagined as inclusive, conscious of its landscape and contexts, locale, history, myths and memory, amnesia, politics, cultures and futures; reimagined via intense conversations and inter-epistemic dialogue; reimagined through different ways of knowing, belonging and doing. Key agendas, polemics and contestations at stake in this two-part publication project are raised in Tony Birch’s thought-provoking article that serves equally as an introductory essay.' (Introduction)
Contents indexed selectively.
'Traditional literary genres, such as the novel, lyric poetry and short fiction have been at the centre of Australian literary practice since European colonisation. Increasingly, however, Australian creative writers are making use of narrative and poetic forms that do not sit comfortably within accepted genre classifications. They are doing so partly in order to respond to their encounters with fragmentation and multivalency and to register the disparate, the diverse and the ‘broken’ in postmodernity. It is possible that contemporary culture requires such literary forms in order to speak truthfully about the crises at the heart of modernity centred on identity, the interpenetration and mixing of cultures, and the need to find authentic ways of speaking. One form that crosses and destabilises genres is the prose poem. Prose poetry enables intimate lyrical gestures to be joined to a limited narrative discursiveness and signals that the ‘prosaic’ and the ‘poetic’ are frequently bound together. In doing so, it challenges assumptions about what may be ‘said’ in writing, and whether much of human experience in the twenty-first century may best be expressed through the creation of ‘in-between’ literary spaces (and associated tropes of absence and indeterminacy), rather than through traditional generic models. Using examples from contemporary Australian prose poets, this paper demonstrates the way in which Australian prose poetry prioritises spaces of uncertainty and anxiety to rework the British and American canon and make its own identity.' (Publication abstract)
'This paper considers the aesthetic and material concepts of the threshold as they figure in contemporary Australian poetry, and examines how the threshold can be a productive and generative space in Australian poetics. The metaphor of the threshold as a point of entry or beginning, place of transition, place of exit, rite of passage, or liminal space, speaks to the writer’s imagination as a location of potent creative power. It is here, on the threshold, that a writer gestates ideas, follows the call of the initial creative impulse, and brings her words forth to be shaped. During this (w)rite of passage something new is made. For a writer, being on the threshold is at once a place where she can thresh out ideas (receptive), and the site of creative acts (generative).' (Publication abstract)
'This article takes an autobiographical approach to explore the changes that have occurred in Australian suburbia over the past twenty years. It considers two key queer texts—Christos Tsiolkas’s Loaded (1995) and Peter Polites’s Down the Hume (2017)—and the manner in which the protagonists of these novels express their class and sexuality in their respective suburbanscapes. Published more than twenty years apart, I argue that the process of queering Australian suburbia that can be read in both novels opens up a space to reimagine how class, ethnic and sexual mobility is negotiated in contemporary Australia.' (Publication abstract)
