'I lie on the lush cold grass. It’s familiar and safe, a sensation I have found difficult to retrieve in my adult years. The afternoon rays of light break through the grove of trees as the sound of birds sipping softly on hanging fruit creates a soothing hum. The grass is long enough for me to fade away to watch my own private slideshow of morphing clouds. I feel the damp earth beneath me, breathe in the fresh air that flows freely into my lungs. Nostalgia for a simpler time of making up storylines, of dancing bears and fire-breathing dragons high up in the sky. What I yearn for is a place of uninterrupted peace. Somehow this is more than memory, it is home.' (Introduction)
'When Jasbir K. Puar coined the term ‘homonationalism’ in Terrorist Assemblages (2007), she was referring to a liberally-sanctioned queerness that had gained credibility in a post-9/11 world. It was, according to her, a biopolitics that pits a ‘sexual exceptionalism’ of the ‘global gay left’ against ‘perverse, improperly hetero- and homo- Muslim sexualities’. Within homonationalism, there lay the ‘convivial relations’ between queerness and neoliberal tendencies – such as privatisation, militarism, surveillance, deportation and empire – that lean on a nationalistic ‘imagined community’ while hawking an illusory feeling of freedom. Not dissimilar to carceral feminism, homonationalism espouses a quasi-progressive rhetoric that justifies racist, xenophobic and aporophobic positions.' (Introduction)
'Across her seven novels, Amanda Lohrey has been interested in the role that reading plays in our lives. In her work, reading is always situated: we know where her characters read, how it shapes and is shaped by their circumstances. We follow 1950s Hobart communists from their reading groups to the docks to the courtroom. In a near-future Australia, characters read to find some guidance about how to act meaningfully in the face of political crisis. A woman’s reading of Jane Eyre in a dark Leichhardt terrace scaffolds her life and decisions. Another character reads Madame Bovary on a canal boat, freezing, miserable and surrounded by rowdy teenagers, and finds herself oddly reflected. A city man moves to the bush and reads travel writing about another land stolen, fought over and decimated.' (Introduction)
'Jessica Anderson’s Tirra Lirra by the River is one of the few Australian novels of the 1970s that has remained in print since its first release. By contrast, to take just one example, four-time Miles Franklin winner Thea Astley’s books have been out of print a few times – this remains the case for The Acolyte, which won the Miles Franklin in 1972. Perhaps in part because of its easily digestible length, Tirra Lirra is a staple of high school and university curricula. Tirra Lirra tells the story of Nora Porteus’ return to her family home in Brisbane after decades overseas. As she is ill and is nearing the end of her life, Nora’s mind turns to her past, her ex-husband, friends, and the interplay of art and labour.' (Introduction)
