'Over the past decade Australia’s policies on border protection have achieved a certain dark notoriety, in their often-vexed (although perhaps not vexed enough) reception both at home and abroad. While there has been extensive, if not necessarily efficacious, public debate about the legal and political dimensions of these policies, together with some coverage of their human, most often medical, consequences for refugees and asylum-seekers, there has been less opportunity for us to attend more closely to the statements and self-expression of those who have been caught up most directly and intensely in those policies.
'Testimonial accounts by detainees from Australian offshore centres are now beginning to be published and made available to the wider Australian public, as in the 2017 publication, They Cannot Take the Sky: Stories From Detention, (ed Michael Green, André Dao et al) along with manifestos, such as that by Behrouz Boochani, a Kurdish journalist, currently held on Manus, who has been detained since 2013. In addition to these, in 2017, Island magazine published “Chanting of Crickets, Ceremonies of Cruelty: A Mythic Topography of Manus Prison,” an extract from Boochani’s forthcoming book, No Friend But The Mountains: Writing From Manus Prison, described by the publishers as “a lyric first-hand account” of his experiences.
'These works – testimonials, manifesto, poetic novel/memoir – don’t simply provide an account of the lives and experiences of the refugees and asylum seekers; they also delineate a relationship with the Australian public. They imagine or posit a dialogue with us. In this paper, I want to propose that we approach the dialogue being proposed by the asylum-seeker writings as a mode of literary engagement. To put this another way, I’m proposing that these works demand attentive reading from us, not only in our responsibilities as citizens but also and most particularly as literary readers or scholars. In thinking about literary reading as a point of necessary public interface, I am responding to line of thought proposed by Boochani in his resonant account of the task of writing the truth of refugee detainment in his essay in They Cannot Take the Sky, where he argues that literary language is fundamental to the expression of difficult truths: “I publish a lot of stories in the newspapers and in the media about Manus, but people, really, they cannot understand our condition, not in journalistic language. Where we are is too hard. I think only in literary language can people understand our life and our condition.”' (Publication abstract)
'Critical literature concerning Tim Winton’s male protagonists is divided. Whilst various critics ultimately celebrate Winton’s men and their sacred communion with nature (McCredden, Ashcroft, Birns), others critique such characters as embodiments of brute androcentrism (Schürholz, Knox). But there is room to read Winton’s representations of masculinity more fluidly, particularly if we account for the strong environmentalist thread in his fiction. In his most recent novel The Shepherd’s Hut (2018), damaged and bung-eyed teenager Jaxie Claxton traverses the Western Australian interior and grapples with the traumatic influence of his abusive father. Jaxie’s engagement with nature is complex and often contradictory – he constantly oscillates between aggressive hostility and a more enlightened biocentric humility. Whilst aware of the novel’s overt engagement with patriarchal violence and toxic masculinity, this paper seeks to explore these complex environmental nuances – most significantly, Jaxie’s revision of pastoral anthropocentrism. ' (Publication abstract)
'Charles Jury was a prominent figure in Adelaide’s literary world in the middle of the twentieth century but his ideas about poetry were established by the time he was a young adult.
'This paper looks at how Jury might have been a poet ‘of Adelaide’ in the sense of being shaped by the literary culture and institutions of the city in which he grew up. It draws on archival and other sources to bring to light some aspects of Jury’s personal life and early literary career that have not yet been revealed in public.' (Publication abstract)
'In her collection of poems Cicada Chimes, Helen Koukoutsis, an Australian poet of Greek Orthodox heritage explores the conflicting emotions produced by death and loss. The collection begins with her father’s funeral and ends with a dramatic manifesto that shows grief’s expressive power. The questions that frame this reading of Cicada Chimes are: how does this modern Australian poet utilise cultural and religious traditions for elegy? What type of spirituality does Koukoutsis identify with? And how does her work both draw on, and critically distance itself from traditional Greek rituals of lament? I will argue that Koukoutsis’ speaker positions herself both inside and outside her Orthodox faith tradition. Her inherited Eastern Mediterranean beliefs and customs are a source of consolation for her, but they are also sites of alienation and oppression. This collection of poems negotiates this contradictory relationship to tradition.' (Publication abstract)
'This article explores the role of humour in three contemporary Aboriginal texts that document Aboriginal–Asian relationships. Humour in Aboriginal texts has mostly been studied with reference to the ostensible binaries between Aboriginal and European, Black and White, colonised and colonisers. Scant critical attention has been paid to the place of humour in revealing and concealing the dynamic interrelations between Aboriginal people and Asian immigrants living under a colonial regime. This article investigates humour as a textual device that transmits subversive ideas contesting stigma and stereotypes of Aboriginal and Asian peoples regarding their identities, bodies, and inter-racial intimacies. Through close readings of Alexis Wright’s novel Plains of Promise (1997), Tex and Nelly Camfoo’s autobiography Love against the Law (2000) and Anita Heiss’s historical romance Barbed Wire and Cherry Blossoms (2016), this article considers three specific modes of humour in Aboriginal texts: self-deprecation, puns/wit, and boasting. The article contends that these different forms of humour draw attention to a range of unsettling issues and power relations concerning oppression and resistance, stigmatisation and normalisation, institutional control and surveillance. Further in each of these texts humour works to deconstruct images of discrete and maligned racialised otherness.' (Publication abstract)
