Cirrus@Austlit

'Following is as excerpt from the proposal I made to this year's Association for the Study of Australian Literature conference.

'Years ago when I made a similar proposal for an ASAL conference, a colleague discouraged me by saying It sounds interesting but its not the convention for a writer to talk about himself or his own writings.

'I immediately sensed what was hidden behind the remark: A writer is better dead than talk about himself, about his own writings and about his own writings in one language, compared with his own writings in another.'' (Introduction)

My daughters trap me in a womanly furrow. Their infancies so lovely, when theyre all suck and ravenous touch, tiny scraps of flesh clinging like carnivorous  flowers, so helpless and entirely mine—How sad that they grow and turn their thoughts into secrets, they have sorrows they no longer tell me. Sometimes they're so far away, I feel afraid. What will I do then? I am still young. Where my husband is weak, I will be all endurance, my children shall look up and see a mountain. And yet he calls me soft and spoilt, he mocks my small lands. It is not just of him. And I am silent. I say nothing. to say the truth could kill him, is that not right? And I am strong enough. What other can I be? 
—Alison Crggon, Navigatio 

'Nada Awar Jarrar is a Lebanese Australian author. She writes in English, and her work belongs to the Anglo•Lebanese exile literature. When she was a child, she had to leave Lebanon because of the civil war (1975-90). She lived in Australia, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States before settling in Lebanon in 1995. In 2006, the thirty-three-day war with Israel broke out, and she fled to the mountains of Lebanon. She wrote Unsafe Haven in 2016 while residing in Beirut at the time of the Syrian war. Nearly all the novel's characters are displaced by wars in their homelands, and through their stories, Jarrar explores the different effects of displacement. Her protagonist describes how the whole Middle East region has been in turmoil, and people "find themselves disconnected and dependent on whatever and whomever provides reprieve from this state of drifting" (80). Displaced during the civil war, she flees to Cyprus for part of her life.' (Introduction(
 

'In discussing the creative processes that underpin his novels, Tim Winton himself identifies the importance of place: "The place comes first' If the place isn't interesting to me then I can't feel it. I can't feel any people in it. I can't feel what the people are on about or likely to get up to" (Steger). For this reason, Winton has often been perceived as a writer who champions belonging. Some critics even argue that his narratives reinforce conservative, settler-colonial attitudes to place. Jennifer Rutherford, for instance, analyzes The Riders as a narrative of belonging that seeks "to reaffirm the legitimacy of white Australian narratives of nation and to reinforce nationalist narcissism" (153). If isolated elements of a particular novel may lead to this conclusion, an analysis of Winton's oeuvre shows that, as he revisits the bush, the ocean, the littoral, the outback, the city, and the suburb, the author does not validate traditional or conservative conceptions of place. Winton may be a popular writer, but he does not allow his readers to be complacent and accept the legacy of the colonial past. For the past three decades, Winton's fiction has kept probing the contested issue of settler legitimacy. The Rider (1994), Dirt Music (2001), Breath (2008), and Eyrie (2013) explore how non-Indigenous Australians attempt to renegotiate spatial relationships in this context of social, cultural, political, and spatial instability. In a recent analysis of Winton's oeuvre, The Fiction of Tim Winton: Earth and Sacred (2016), Lyn McCredden argues that his recent novels question the "supposed stabilities of place" (11) and that "Tim Winton is the poet of non-belonging" (109). ' (Introduction)
 

'When dusk falls in regional Australia, it is common to see mobs of kangaroos ranging in paddocks and on golf courses. They lounge about in family groups in the shade of remnant eucalyptus trees and share the pasture of bovines. They seem peaceful and idyllic, with their wide, dark eyes, cute joeys, and unique gait, and they appear to have close family bonds. They are the most visible and commonplace of Australia's unique animals. Despite all the charm of these awe-inspiring creatures and their status as a national icon, Australian writers perpetually kill them off. Recent Australian fiction has featured native animals that gain substantial narrative agency. Stephen Daisley's Coming Rain (2015) and Louis Nowra's Into That Forest (2012) undertake extended narratives from the perspective of native animals. The dingo and the thylacine, respectively, are given voice in fiction by these works. Domestic, nonnative animals in Australia have also received serious treatment recently by authors such as Eva Hornung and Michelle de Kretser. But Australian stories are less sympathetic toward the kangaroo. One appears struggling in a rabbit trap, doomed and dying in Charlotte Wood's The Natural Way of Things (2015), Tim Winton has one killed on the road, dissected and fed to dogs in Breath (2008). There is an inventory of such examples. Serious treatment of the extinct thylacine abounds, but the kangaroo is often represented as roadkill and dog food. The expendable nature of the kangaroo is a widely held view in Australia, so it is little wonder that this attitude is articulated in our fiction; but it is a bitter irony that the creature that defines us to the rest of the world is perpetually under siege, in life and in literature.' (Introduction)
 

Looking backward over the vast expanses of literary and literal time and space in Michael Wilding's world, the hopes and fears he foreshadowed in his early work as a literary critic, academic teacher, creative writer, and publisher seem to have come true. His warnings (predictions, fears) may have been realized as the university, publishing, creative arts, political freedoms have all disappeared or crumbled. The world that has been emerging since the end of the wildly halcyon days of the 1960s freedoms has been eroded with the advent of a hyperworld filled with the state apparatus's technologies of surveillance and internal repression through self-induced fears and doubts.' (Introduction) 
 

'I am writing in the front room of Murrays Cottage, where Donald Friend made his home for two years, until he left for Europe in March 1949. He visited again from time to time in later years. His friend Donald Murray remained in the cottage until his death in 1988, for Russell Drysdale and Friend had combined to purchase the cottage for him, Friend's stays in Hill End, and the extended stays by artist friends such as Russell Drysdale and Margaret Olley, transformed the almost deserted ex-goldmining town into the artists' colony it remains to this day. According to the local shopkeeper, the population of the town today is 117. In 1872, at the height of the gold rush, the population was anywhere between 10,000 and 30,000, depending on whom you believe.' (Introduction)