Cirrus@Austlit

'Jo Jones’s Falling Backwards is balanced on the notion that “Some stories are hard to tell.” The question of how best to engage with this trauma—how to look back, openly and sensitively, into the darkness of Australia’s colonial past—is at the heart of her volume. The titular image of falling backwards gestures towards this work’s primary insight. Falling is usually an involuntary act. Yet, in acknowledging that we must tumble loose from our present assumptions, we might open ourselves up to a productive disorientation. This process allows ideas about self and other, belonging and identity, to shift and emerge anew. Ultimately, Falling Backwards is a thoughtful analysis of the politics of literary form in contemporary historical fiction. Jones does not object to realism per se, but to the ethical compromises that can occur when this classically linear, unified and self-affirming mode is applied to the representation of a positivistically unknowable past. ' (Introduction)

'David Carter and Roger Osborne’s volume looks at publishing history as a form of literary history. The authors’ proficiency in the archive and their thoroughness of research tells a story of both the splendors and, far more, the miseries of the reception of Australian books in the United States.'  (Introduction)

'I wanted it to be true. I wanted it to be true because it was there in the primary sources. It was there in the journals and the biographies: slaves bought and sold in India, in Arabia. The trans-Indian Ocean slave trade and the slave trade within India that passed by other names. Black men bought and sold them. Brown men bought and sold them. White men were sometimes good to do business with. Governor Lachlan Macquarie bought two of them. He says so himself. All the biographers have tracked this down. Centuries pass. The memory of slavery chooses its own path and changes form with every age. My friend in Kochi says slavery ended when the Dutch period ended. The British freed all the slaves. It’s a factual flaw, he says, in response to my enquiry about the slave trade in 1795. As for Lachlan Macquarie, a man who would be Governor, he knew what he was doing.' (Introduction)