Cirrus@Austlit

'This article explores stories of rewriting Australian history by Aboriginal women through literature. My focus is on the narrative poetry and prose testimonials by Aboriginal women writers that interact with the archive, using the term archive as Derrida defined it: as something that is much broader than but including storehouses of official paper work and records and that evokes voices from the past that recall and re-member trauma and resilience through "blood memory" (see Allen) and the Aboriginal body-particularly the bodies of Aboriginal women. Our bodies are an archive where memories are etched, stored, and anchored. This is the living archive that I inherit, and my mind and body becomes a repository of my family's Aboriginal history-even before it was told to me and even now as some of it still remains untold or is still missing. Thus, for me, the politics of memory is to remember a dismembered but still living past as it haunts, pervades, and lives in the present.' (Publication abstract)

'The poem as a whole reads, Chinese characters, a shelf on which stand burnt sticks of incense and three oranges, wind gusts broken branches mauve shadows under the jacaranda and oddly, a row of cypress pines along the tin wall of the Rheem factory Apparent gaps in the poem give the visual record of omission. Unlike the previous poems discussed, "Blue Hills 38" is not aerial but works at ground level, describing the historical layers of a suburban area of Melbourne; the poem as a whole reads, Lanes I will never trace of sheoak and flowering gum fork through these suburbs under the campanile, Mentone, where the rail curves towards the bay and its townships: median clock towers and creek borders, overtaken by the city, the lowlands between, drained, filled in, overlooked by railway stations, a vista from Edithvale to Wheelers Hill. The speculation here regards the question of art's relationship-in this case, of non-Aboriginal art-to its environment in Australia and its willingness to allow its language and conventions to be thereby changed. [...]the line democratizes art and heat as simply two small words, two potentially volatile ingredients. The properties of art and heat in "Blue Hills 48" are mirrored by a transformative exchange between architecture and art: australian mercantile lanD concrete lettering embossed around the warehouse entablature broken off on one wall leaving the infill of words in red brick, a negative space with the unexpected gravity of a Magritte.' (Publication abstract)

a kind of beautiful order and a mastery of certain pleasures and appetites.

-Plato, Republic

'Whether it be Sir John Franklin confronting a "sense of his own horror" while hallucinating and dying in Flanagan's Wanting (177), Oblivia, mute and with no agency, possessed only of memories that Bella Donna "has chosen to tell her" in Wright's Swan Book (89) and ending her days in a ghost swamp (334), or Aljaz Cosini finding himself in a "gorge of death" because he has ignored the "language" of the landscape in Flanagan's Death of a River Guide (296-97), both authors write of an erosion of being and purpose, often using landscape and the history inscribed on that landscape to describe existential crisis. Magic realism, even its constituent words, has little relation with what Franz Roh proposed in his seminal 1925 essay on a new form of painting: the term has not only shifted its main focus from one artistic endeavor to another but has often features of surrealism or what Roh (dismissively) called "Expressionism," a term he used to explicitly label Marc Chagall's modernist work, characterized as including animals walking in the sky, heads "popped like corks," "chromatic storms," and distortions of perspective (Faris 17). Wright's dream of a common spirituality of reconciliation, also expressed in interview, also has resonances with Fuentes's belief (33) that all Mexicans need to recognize that Indians are intrinsically part of their culture, their identity and heritage, and must therefore work to ensure justice for that population. [...]the invading colonial culture was initially penal, brutalizing, and authoritative and indeed sought to make the entire landscape an unescapable and perfect prison.' (Publication abstract)

'[...]the three concepts of perceived space, conceived space, and lived space are used as the theoretical framework to investigate how the social space participates in Rose's life and how different factors join to cause her personal disillusionment and eventually her death. [...]the multicultural history of Australian society is highlighted and celebrated to ensure positive space production for all Australians, so that tragedies such as Rose's do not happen. Lefebvre's spatial triad illuminates space and ever yday politics connecting space with history and society, which helps us better and more broadly "understand the complexity and originality of the global space we live in" (Wegner 179). [...]the discussion of the film The Home Song Stories in this article attempts to "grasp the concrete" through Lefebvre's triadic spaces to understand the complexity of Rose's tragedy in-depth. Yet this space includes not only the built environment but also the processes by which materiality is produced. [...]perceived space can be analyzed in relation to the practice of a repressive space, the way space is dominated, the way body is appropriated, and the way the relation in the space is reproduced.' (Publication abstract)

'[...]Peter Widdowson argues that Jack Maggs, along with a number of other counterdiscursive novels, are books that "almost invariably have a clear cultural-political thrust": " That is why the majority of them align themselves with feminist and/or postcolonialist criticism in demanding that past texts' complicity in oppression . . . be revised and re-visioned as part of the process of restoring a voice, a history and an identity to those hitherto re-visionary fiction exploited, marginalized and silenced by dominant interests and ideologies" (505-6). Because of the novel's overt generic subversiveness and its direct engagement with Victorian literature, it is not a surprise that Jack Maggs has been viewed as a predictable category through this kind of reductive and self-affirming lens more than most of Carey's other novels have. Savery was married in England and had a son named Henry, who, like his namesake Maggs's adopted son, would have been twenty-one years old in 1837. [...]of the only three copies left of the original manuscripts of Saver y's Quintos Servinton, one is held in the Mitchell Library in Sydney, where Maggs's fictional letters are preserved. [...]it is that language and literature jointly provide political foundations for a nation" (World 34). Schmidt-Haberkamp comments on the usage of the phrase "such is life" by Great Expectations' working-class Joe and Maggs and the way that it reverberates with the nationalist spirit of Joseph Furphy's classic Australian novel Such Is Life: "Containing the fictional diaries of Tom Collins, a former bullocky, the novel in 1897 was offered to The Bulletin for serial publication by its author with the description: 'Temper democratic; bias, offensively Australian'" (258). [...]Jack Maggs is as much a text about Carey as it is about Dickens, Maggs, and Oates and the literary cultures that all of these "authors" dwell in and represent, divided around two literary poles of England and Australia.' (Publication abstract)

Author's note: Pandion haliaetus

'Native title was increasingly being seen as a regime of limited property rights that could be curbed by governments at a whim. [...]while many Aboriginal people have certainly benefited from native title determinations 3 since the Native Title Act was passed in 1993, Mabo-based native title offers no recompense to the majority of Aboriginal people living in Australia today, because most of them have been dispossessed of their traditional lands, or their native title rights have been extinguished by land grants to settlers. For Watson, the gains of native title have been "meagre at best, illusory at worst" (284). [...]as the Mabo decision and the native title claims process have proved increasingly disappointing for more Aboriginal people in their aspirations for justice and land rights, attention has returned to sovereignty, something that was expressly denied them in Mabo. The recognition of native title rights in the Mabo decision of 1992, while "truly a catalytic political event" (Russell 279), also provided no advances on the question of sovereignty. [...]all three of these state initiatives from the early 1990s functioned, in effect, to displace calls for a treaty and indigenous sovereignty for a number of years. Wright's narrator explains that "Aboriginal Law handed down through the ages since time began" provides the foundational basis for living on the land (2). [...]the machinations and the history of the "white" nation-state are subordinated to Aboriginal Law early in this novel, and the carriers of Aboriginal Law are established as sovereigns of this place.'  (Publication abstract)

'[...]it is a conversation about Australia that exposes the sense of cultural superiority of the "ridiculously over-confident" (53) "Bertolt Brecht lookalike" (48; see also 94) and opposes it to Delage's own lack of self-confidence (exemplified, in the first place, by "his surprise" at being asked about his native countr y; 92). [...]the critic is more interested in Australia's natural stereotypes than in its architectural icons, which implies that, in his view, nature easily outweighs culture on the antipodean continent: "he only wanted to know about the dangerous spiders and sharks that infested Australia, and the snakes, how lethal were they really" (92); for him, the Sydney Opera House, which Delage's personal complex of secondarity leads him to consider "provincial" (70), is simply "typical of the New World['s]" preference for "appearance over substance" (92), while Delage is, for his part, tempted to think that it is precisely his piano's "appearance . . . [that] had shifted attention from the technical improvements hidden beneath the lid" (148). According to Eileen Battersby, Bail's "concise in scale" but "vastly thought-provoking novel" contains "some inspired nods to the great Austrian writer Thomas Bernhard's final [sic] novel, Woodcutters" (1984), which offers an über-critical portrayal of a "cannibalistic city" seemingly graced with a propensity for dragging the higher reaches of its "ap- palling society" (Bernhard 34) into what Bernhard describes as an insufferable "social hell" (4)-thereby subverting the values of this cultural elite from within since he8 was, up to a certain point, part of the same "artistic coterie" (Bernhard 84). [...]the Australian creator's own ongoing subservience to Western standards (despite Europe's enduringly paternalistic and misplaced assumptions of cultural superiority) is presented as his or her predicament.'  (Publication abstract)

'Sean Lowry, founder and executive director of Project Anywhere and convener of creative and performing arts at the University of Newcastle, Australia, was in New York City in December 2014 for Project Anywhere's inaugural biennial conference, hosted by the School of Art, Media, and Technology at Parsons School for Design. Project Anywhere: Art at the Outer Limits of Location Specificity is an attempt to create a context in which one might host artistic research and in which the entire globe might be regarded as potential exhibition or performance space. After two years, and with a number of key institutions around the world involved-all of whom have representatives on the editorial committee-ten of the twelve projects that successfully navigated into the proposal stage were able to come along to our first conference event, which ironically is staged far from the outermost limits of location specificity, in New York City [laughter]. To me, something significant happened to the course of Australian art at that point where it realized-I think through the writings of the late Paul Taylor, an Australian expat who moved to New York, and others such as Rex Butler-and recognized that Australian artists possessed an understanding of art that was built through reproduction, as you pointed out, but also that there might be some paradoxical advantage in taking stock of this original/unoriginal status.'  (Publication abstract)

'[...]in Picnic, Joan Lindsay reconceptualizes what Coss calls the "familiar device" (101) of the sentient house to fit an Australian context. [...]while the haunted house can stand in as an easy metaphor for numerous concerns such as the "haunted" nation, the sentient house, on the other hand, challenges the metaphorical value of "hauntedness." (5-6) As I mentioned earlier, Bailey is referring exclusively to sentient houses in American fiction, but aside from the lack of an explicit "prosaic description" of Appleyard College as "malign," the house in Picnic at Hanging Rock fits the numerous criteria of Bailey's "formula" almost perfectly: the enterprising English widow Mrs. Appleyard moves into a "misfit" and "anachronistic" Australian mansion, unconcerned that the "forgotten" first owner sold the house after only "a year or two" (8); she populates it with a symbolic "family" in the form of her students and employees; "fault lines" appear in the "family" with the mysterious disappearance of the mathematics teacher, Greta McCraw, and three students, Miranda, Irma, and Marion, while on a picnic at the nearby Hanging Rock; and because of "gradually escalating assaults"- including the discovery of a dead pupil in the garden-at the end of the novel Mrs. Appleyard commits suicide, and the house is destroyed in a bushfire. [...]thing theory can only be used to a certain extent when examining the symbolic impact of the house in the novel because the house is not in fact "largely inconsequential in the rhetorical hierarchy of the text" (Freedgood 2).' (Publication abstract)