'The circus is back in town. Senate Estimates hearings on Thursday 25 October, 2018, revealed that Simon Birmingham, in his term as Minister for Education, personally vetoed over $4 million worth of public funding reserved for competitively tendered research projects. These projects had been recommended for funding approval by the Australian Research Council (ARC) after progressing through one of the most rigorous peer review processes in the world. In keeping with previous statistics, the approval rate for applications in the 2017–18 funding period was below 20%.5 The ministerial rejection of these grants was not made public until the Senate Estimates session in question, and the ARC representatives present for Senate Estimates—Chief Executive Officer Sue Thomas and Executive General Officer Leanne Harvey—repeatedly stated that the “minister is the decision-maker,” and that they were never provided with any reasons for his decision to decline the funding.6 Two factors are particularly disheartening in this whole affair: firstly, each vetoed project was within the already chronically underfunded field of the humanities, with no other fields of research being similarly impacted; secondly, these rejections were largely targeted at early-career researchers, with the termination of three Discovery Early Career Researcher Awards (totalling $1,057,828) and two Future Fellowships (totalling $1,691,116). Liberal Senator James Paterson immediately leapt to the defence of his government’s decision: “I just want to take the opportunity for placing on the record my appreciation to [the minister] for his careful stewardship of taxpayer dollars.”' (Editorial introduction)
Contents indexed selectively.
In her entry on Eleanor Dark in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Marivic Wyndham notes that “psychology fascinated Dark, and the bush was her physical and spiritual solace.” As Wyndham continues, “[Dark] drew compelling landscapes of the mind and of the Australian natural environment.”1 This article will discuss the dissolution of boundaries between the landscape and mindscape in Dark’s work, and it will consider how the natural world infiltrates modernist explorations of interiority in Dark’s third published novel, Return to Coolami (1936).2 In examining the convergence of modernism and ecopoetics in Dark’s prose, this essay brings together two supposedly distinct modes of critical enquiry: environmental humanities scholarship and modernism studies. By exploring the intersection of these two approaches, this reading will challenge the binary conception in which modernist texts lack any authorial, subjective, or narratorial investment in the natural world and, in so doing, bring to light a range of complementarities between ecopoetics and modernism. In Return to Coolami, the natural world inescapably affects human interiority, and Dark’s eco-modern prose precipitates a new awareness of ecological being that complicates anthropocentric worldviews.' (Introduction)
Author's note: For Mme Ma Lee August, 2016
'A long time ago, there was a beautiful princess. Her name was Cassandra. Suitors far and wide coveted her, and asked her father, King Priam, for her hand in marriage. And yet, she refused them all. Her only wish was to be a priestess of the goddess Athena, to worship her in a beautiful temple deep within the walls of Ilium. Like Athena, she refused all marriage proposals, choosing instead to live forever as a maiden.'
