Cirrus@Austlit

'In Gail Jones’ 2018 novel about the life and death of Noah Glass, his ‘vocation’ as an art historian begins when, as a small boy growing up in the remote north of Western Australia, he opens a book about the Great Art Museums of the World. It translates him miraculously from the Mars-orange landscape of the outback to the rarefied, Prussian-blue world of Piero della Francesca: it was a ‘window to elsewhere’ and ‘other worlds and times blazed as portents from the pages’. The significance of this moment is confirmed twenty years later when, as a student in London, Noah discovers Piero’s The Nativity (c. 1470-5) hanging in the National Gallery: ‘Noah walked around the National Gallery, taking meticulous notes, registering line by line his self-improvement’. These are instances of what Peter Wagner calls intermediality: the intertextual use of one medium, such as painting, in another medium, such as prose fiction.' (Introduction)

'The title of Kate Lilley’s poetry collection is a poem all by itself. On the title page ‘TILT’ appears beneath the author’s name, making a visual rhyme with the ‘T’ from ‘Kate’, the ‘IL’ from ‘Lilley’. TILT is a not-quite-palindrome, only the horizontal on the ‘L’ throws out the symmetry. Being a little off balance is useful when reading these poems, as Lilley tips things askew to shake out what’s been camouflaged. As we read we’ll learn that Tilt was the name of a movie about pinball that starred a thirteen-year-old Brooke Shields. In pinball, it’s okay to nudge the machine to try and stay in control of the game, but to tilt the table is considered cheating. I’m not keen to make a reading of the word ‘tilt’ that references Don Quixote, despite Brian Bird’s 1948 photograph of ‘Luna Park lighted windmill’ that appears on the cover of the book. The giants Lilley rides at in these poems are not imaginary.' (Introduction)

'I first read Xavier Herbert’s remarkable novel Capricornia in 1972 – the year I was married – and it led to several heated discussions with my newly acquired father-in-law. Later I discovered that his grazier forebears had been – for their time – enlightened squatters. Around 1900, they commissioned Steele Rudd’s father, the ex-convict Thomas Davis, to write a memoir of his early days on the Darling Downs. As well as a frank account of frontier violence, it included an extensive glossary of Aboriginal words.'  (Introduction)

'Six Degrees from the City is a podcast about writing in Western Sydney, hosted by the writer and critic Fiona Wright. Each episode features a writer based in or hailing from the western suburbs of Sydney, one of the most diverse – as well as most maligned – areas in Australia, and the site of some of our most interesting and challenging literature and conversations. This episode features the children’s author and occasional comedian, Oliver Phommavanh.' (Introduction)

'In his astonishing book At the Mind’s Limits: Contemplations by a survivor on Auschwitz and its realities (1980), Jean Améry devotes a chapter to intellectuals in the Nazi camp. An essayist and novelist himself, he focuses on how writers made sense of their incarceration. ‘Did intellectual background and an intellectual basic disposition help a camp prisoner in the decisive moments?’ he asks. ‘Did they make survival easier for him?’'  (Introduction)

'From Armageddon to Ragnarok and the Rapture, humans persist in imagining the end of the world. The religious term is eschatology, and the literary terms are many. Some are jocular (Disaster Porn), or precisely denote a sub-genre (Post-Apocalypse, Solarpunk). Climate change or Anthropocene fiction is the latest variant on the theme, and if we believe our scientists — and woe betide us if we do not — these may be the final words. The end of the world as we know it approacheth, and nobody is feeling fine. Even the denialists feel the heat of the sand around their heads.'  (Introduction)

'Imagine that you are a six-year-old child. One day, you get a sore throat and a headache and start to feel generally icky. Your parents put you to bed. You don’t get better. Within a few days, you cannot move your legs and your back has begun to curve. You have caught an infectious disease known as poliomyelitis or infantile paralysis. It is a virus that attacks mainly children. There is no known cure. You might die. If you survive, you will spend the rest of your life as a cripple, able to walk only with your legs strapped into contraptions of steel and leather. You will be the child, the one that every primary school has, who clumps around in callipers, unable to run and skip and join in the other children’s games. Worst of all, you will become an object of pity.' (Introduction)

'Anthony Uhlmann has long been interested in the philosophical function of literature – not only its capacity to contain philosophical discussion, but the formal unfolding of the literary work itself as a philosophical act. St Antony in His Desert, Uhlmann’s first foray into fiction, is an unapologetically cerebral book, incorporating a key debate in the early twentieth-century clash between philosophy and physics.  The tripartite structure of the novel is prefaced by an editor’s foreword, penned by one ‘Anthony Uhlmann’ of Western Sydney University, which is where the author teaches. He has been sent an unfinished typescript – an account of philosopher Henri Bergson’s historic encounter with Albert Einstein – on the verso of which an apparently fictional story is written. The author of these two narratives, we are told, is a priest named Antony Elm, whose brief interjections are also inscribed here and there on the palimpsestic text. The package has been sent to our editor by a nurse working at a hospital in the Northern Territory, to which the priest, perhaps defrocked or disgraced, was taken following his failed attempt at a monastic retreat into the desert. Of Elm the author, we know little more than this. From the opening pages of St Antony – as we parse the editor’s foreword and orient our reading to the multilayered text described – it is clear that the novel’s philosophical preoccupations will inhere as much in its form as in its content.' (Introduction)