Australia in Three Books single work   essay  
Issue Details: First known date: 2019... 2019 Australia in Three Books
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'Our lives are made up of different arcs—love, family, politics, geography, time and dislocation among them. One of the arcs that has exercised me most is my wondering about post-colonising Australia and its myths and mythmaking propensities, also about my family’s.

'Although my childhood was spent mostly in Melbourne, it was punctuated by our frequent pilgrimages to the promised land (aka South Australia) and inflected by the awareness that Melbourne was exile to my South Australian mother—feelings I do not share. She often reminded us of our ‘free settler’ heritage, and of our roots in the colonial era, no more than a blink of time ago in the face of 50,000 or more years of Aboriginal occupation; my horror has only grown with the intervening years.

'We loved South Australia for our own reasons: for heat, our peerless great-grandmother, wild freedom and the beach. But an awareness of myth, of the stories we tell and the ways we frame present and past, was kindled. If there is an arc in this selection, it is that the postcolonial Australia that I first began to think about as a child—if only at the edges of my mind—is a myth. It always has been.' (Introduction)

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

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    y separately published work icon Meanjin vol. 78 no. 3 Spring 2019 17742582 2019 periodical issue

    'In the lead essay UNEARTHED: Last Days of The Anthropocene, James Bradley writes compellingly on the urgent crisis of climate change. 'There is a conversation I do not know how to have, a conversation about what happens if we are headed for disaster. It is not a theoretical question for me. I have two daughters.'

    'Miles Franklin shortlisted author Michael Mohammed Ahmad writes on how his thinking about literature, politics and race was shaped in Reading Malcolm X in Arab-Australia. In an accidental companion piece, This Vast Conspiracy of Memory, Khalid Warsame reflects on life and writing while making a complete reading of the works of James Baldwin.

    'Among this edition's other authors are Glyn Davis, Karen Wyld, Fatima Measham, Maxine Beneba Clarke, Maria Takolander and Meg Mundell.' (Edition introduction)

    2019
    pg. 15-19
Last amended 25 Feb 2021 08:24:10
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