Cirrus@Austlit

'Paul Sharrad's long career sets an enviable standard for modelling locally inflected, postcolonial reading strategies, which work out from his Australian place to read across the Pacific and into the wider world, illuminating literary history, transnational entanglements, and a specifically Pacific literary aesthetic, incorporating both texts and textiles. In this essay, I seek to honour his achievements by reading back across the Pacific, from my location in Canada, to address current representations of the North in Canada and Australia within global contexts of lived connections across cultures. Thinking about the many lessons Sharrad's work offers about cross-cultural translation in colonial and postcolonial times, I raise some agenda-setting questions here. '  (Introduction)

'Before the appearance of his first major book, Capricornia (1938), the Australian novelist Xavier Herbert published approximately forty short stories under different names in a variety of magazines and newspapers.' These are gener-ally regarded as immature, written before he discovered either his voice or his theme, when he was experimenting with different audiences, genres, subjects and pseudonyms, and trying to establish a literary career. Of these early stories, about one quarter have maritime settings, mostly in the Timor, the Arafura, or the Coral Seas. Only two are set in Melanesia: The Ape-Men of Mobongu; in what was then commonly known as Dutch New Guinea, and The Other McLean; in the Solomon Islands. The first appeared in The Boys Weekly in 1927, the second in the Australian Journal (and the Northern Standard the following year).2 In this essay I intend to take a small step toward addressing the fiction of disconnection between Australia and its Pacific neighbours that, until the recent transnational turn in the humanities, Australian scholars have for the most part maintained simply by preferring national to comparative contexts of enquiry. Paul Sharrad has done more than most to extend the Australian frame of reference to include Pacific and south-east Asian cultural production. For that reason, lam pleased to take the opportunity provided by this publication in his honour not only to revisit the facts of Herbert's experience in the Australian-mandated territories of the Pacific in the 1920s, but also to ask what influence it had on his formation as an Australian writer in the 1930s.'  (Introduction)

'The trickster features in a wide range of folkloric, mythic, popular, and literary texts. Spanning antiquity and the contemporary world, tricksters appear in African, Arabic, Asian, Caribbean, European (including Greek, Norse, and Slavic), Pacific, and South American cultures, as well as those of Indigenous peoples in settler nations. Literary trickster figures include the Odyssean wandering hero, the animals in Aesop's fables, the Shakespearean wise fool, and the confidence man in nineteenth-century novels by Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Mark Twain. More recently, trickster figures have been deployed across a range of minority literatures. Jeanne Rosier Smith, for example, discusses the trickster's recent resurgence in the fiction of what she terms ethnic American women writers., Trickster figures have also appeared in Indigenous writing from both the USA and Canada. '  (Introduction)

'This essay explores the stories of young Indian Australian writers who negotiate versions of Indias of the mind' through the presence of parents or grand-parents. For second-generation Indian—Australian writers (with or without the hyphen), the challenge is to reconstruct in their writing an India vaguely remembered from infrequent visits, or constructed through images made avail-able in their family homes, including their parents' memories of an India they cherish but have left behind forever. In reading these stories, I am uneasily aware that the writers are negotiating disjunctures of time, generation, spatializations and dissemination' that refuse to be "neatly aligned These dis-junctures and misalignments are interesting to explore, not least because the texts discussed in this essay were created in an intellectual milieu of intersect-ing discourses of multiculturalism, diaspora, and marginality circulating both globally and in Australia in the 1990s. These discourses are outlined briefly, before I turn to examining the 'Indias of the mind' embedded in stories of second-generation Indian Australian writers and the ways in which they rehearse in-betweenness.' (Introduction)