'This issue of the Journal of Australian Studies goes to print at a time when many Australians are questioning a future of climate disruption. The bushfires that continue to burn have sent smoke particles around the globe, choked cities and regional towns, and led to shock, grief and anger at the scale of destruction to Country. As the debate about climate change pivots to reluctant acceptance and the deep divisions over inaction fade, we will likely remember this period as a kind of shared catastrophe and harbinger of change. We humans are agents of change—individually and collectively—some constructive, others less so. Environment, gender, race: each is reinvented, distorted and manipulated, straitjacketing people and land. In this issue, we look to how gender has been subverted, reimagined and repurposed; how literature and art has given voice to alternate imaginings; and how politics remains central in apology.' (Carolyn Holbrook, James Keating, Julie Kimber , Maggie Nolan & Tom Rogers : Editorial introduction)
'One night in 1865, some men at Melbourne’s Theatre Royal created a disturbance by noisily paying court to married women in the dress circle. A journalist present that night subsequently attacked these “men-poodles” in print. This article examines the models of masculinity that lay behind the different actions and responses of the participants that evening—the normative, domesticated masculinity espoused by the journalist, and dissident models, such as the cavalier-servant, which may have inspired the men-poodles. The article proposes that the incident offers a rare glimpse of queer men creating and exercising a sociability beyond the criminal paradigm that dominates accounts of homosexuality in the colonial era.' (Publication abstract)
'When Joseph Furphy responded to editorial pressure from the Bulletin Publishing Company to shorten Such is Life to expedite publication, he did so by removing two chapters from the 1898 typescript version and replacing them with much shorter ones. The two chapters he removed took on a life of their own when he revised and expanded them to become The Buln-Buln and the Brolga and Rigby's Romance. To date, little is known about the textual and publication history of these novels. To address this gap, this article examines the textual history of Rigby’s Romance, detailing its publication as a serial in Broken Hill’s Barrier Truth, its abridgement published in 1921, and the publication of the unabridged version in 1946. The article argues that, in order to best understand the legacy of Joseph Furphy and his work, any reading of Rigby's Romance and, by association, Such is Life, must engage with the ways in which the versions of the work are entangled in the lives of editors, publishers, critics and general readers.'
'In 1997, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission released Bringing Them Home, documenting historical practices of forced Indigenous child removal in devastating detail. The report was released into a fractious political environment in which historicised understandings of race were being heatedly debated. Responses to the report played out through the media as conservatives sought to reassert a traditional narrative of Australian history. The Howard Coalition government steadfastly refused to implement most recommendations of the report, including a formal national apology. The government’s stance, and its capacity to dominate the news cycle, almost immediately shifted public focus from the contents of the report to its reception. This reframing meant that, when a formal national apology was finally offered by the incoming Rudd Labor government in 2008, it offered closure not to 220 years of racial violence as was claimed, but to a 20-year acrimonious debate dominated by white elites. This process demonstrates the ways that, against the starkest evidence, institutional power can be leveraged to facilitate widespread forgetting of historical violence inflicted upon Indigenous peoples. Indigenous children in Australia continue to be removed from their families at heavily disproportionate rates.' (Publication abstract)
'Both Dennis Altman’s autobiographic Unrequited Love: Diary of an Accidental Activist and the edited anthology Growing up Queer in Australia are engaging books rich in insights into queer life and politics in Australia.' (Introduction)
