'Since the beginning of the twenty-first century Australia has entered a phase known as post-reconciliation, which for some artists and writers has marked a turning-point in race relations and issues of belonging to the multicultural society in an Asia-Pacific environment. While post-reconciliation has paved the way for constitutional recognition of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, the effects of settler history can still be perceived in debates on the nation and cultural identity. Recent nationalist claims and cultural tensions raise concerns about the country’s ability to overcome the colonial past and fully embrace the multicultural ideal. In his article on recent Australian fiction, Nicholas Birns reminds us that Sue Ryan-Fazilleau, in her extensive study of Peter Carey’s work, suggested that the novelist was engaged in a postcolonial quest for identity. Ryan-Fazilleau’s valuable contribution to the study of Australian literature is raised in Birns’s examination of the works of some twenty-first-century Australian authors and the place of technology in their sense of identity.' (From : Introduction)
'This article argues that, since 2004 or so, a new kind of Australian historical novel has emerged among practitioners of literary fiction, one concerned with the mid-twentieth century. This new historical fiction has been characterized by an aesthetic stringency and self-consciousness. Though Steven Carroll and Ashley Hay will be the principal twenty-first-century writers examined, reference will also be made to several other writers including Carrie Tiffany, Charlotte Wood, Sofie Laguna, and to the later work of Peter Carey. In all these contemporary books, technology plays a major role in defining the twentieth century as seen historically.' (Publication abstract)
''Breath', Tim Winton's coming-of-age surfing novel, indirectly links the voluntary risk-taking of adolescent surfers with that of a society teetering on the edge of oceanic climate change. This paper draws on risk theory, the sociology of surfing, oceanic studies, and Winton's related writings to provide an ecocritical reading of 'Breath'.' (Publication abstract)
'Aboriginal Australian artist Albert Namatjira resists identification. Was Namatjira a product of Australia's assimilation, a "mimic man" who adopted a Western referential frame, or was his trajectory the product of a "split identity," as alleged during his lifetime? Can Namatjira's watercolours be viewed as a critique of Eurocentrism? This article seeks to revisit the nature of Namatjira's legacy in light of the recent retrocession of the artist's copyright.' (Publication abstract)
'This article relies on the tropes of trauma and gothic haunting to examine Michelle de Kretser's 'The Lost Dog' (2007), in which the protagonist's discarded Indianness allegorically parallels Australia's unwillingness to confront the ghosts of its past. As the novel and its critique of settler culture seem to suggest, the Australian nation should arguably develop alternative cultural paradigms that seek to accommodate both otherness and the most unwelcome aspects of its history, instead of repressing them.' (Publication abstract)
''Windjarrameru (The Stealing C*nt$)' tells the story of four young Indigenous Australian men who are accused of stealing beer and then chased by police into a marsh that has been contaminated by mining. The film subverts representations of Indigenous Australians in ethnographic film and makes visible the way these representational tools are part of the same destructive force enacted by colonial structures of power that support the mining industry.' (Publication abstract)
'In 'That Deadman Dance', Kim Scott draws on Noongar vocabulary and ontology to im merse readers in a world where rain cries and chuckles as it structures the land according to its own designs. This essay positions Scott' In 'That Deadman Dance', Kim Scott draws on Noongar vocabulary and ontology to immerse readers in a world where rain cries and chuckles as it structures the land according to its own designs. This essay positions Scott's novel as one manifestation of his ongoing commitment to the recovery of repressed Noongar knowledge, and it formulates a framework of ecospectrality to focus attention on the recovery of repressed knowledge of the nonhuman. It contends that Scott adapts the form of the novel to circulate this knowledge to local and global readers, offering it as a resource to shape the future rather than resolve the past. s novel as one manifestation of his ongoing commitment to the recovery of repressed Noongar knowledge, and it formulates a framework of ecospectrality to focus attention on the recovery of repressed knowledge of the nonhuman. It contends that Scott adapts the form of the novel to circulate this knowledge to local and global readers, offering it as a resource to shape the future rather than resolve the past.' (Publication abstract)
