Cirrus@Austlit

'This paper looks at how crime fiction authors borrow not only from real life but from the crime fiction canon and literature when creating new works. Drawing on academic research and other novelists’ methods, it discusses self-reflexivity, self-consciousness, intertextuality, embedded text and mis en abyme within the crime fiction genre and how these features relate to ‘theft’/appropriation; specifically theft from ‘literary’ fiction, post-modern narrative structures and metaphysical detective novels. As a hybrid paper that includes creative extracts, it also examines the author’s use of these tools, and therefore appropriation, to write a PhD novel, ‘My Killer Secret’.'

Source: Abstract.

'David Unaipon (1872-1967) has been described as a scientist, author, anthropologist, preacher, inventor and public speaker. To these descriptions can be added musician, lecturer, curator, political activist, guide, and door-to-door salesman. A master of many trades, descriptions of Unaipon have struggled to merge the various aspects of his life into a single, coherent narrative. This paper focuses on Unaipon’s life stories – the stories told about him and his family and the stories he told about himself. A central argument of this paper is that, rather than describing Unaipon as a jack of all trades (or, worse, a master of none), Unaipon can accurately and productively be described as a ‘rhetor,’ a person using various forms of media (and various forms of life writing) to present arguments across different social, political and cultural contexts to change beliefs about Aboriginality. Further, Unaipon’s rhetoric was fashioned from indigenous and western traditions. To describe Unaipon as a rhetor can re-energise the arguments he put forward during his lifetime, can reveal the consistency and relationship between arguments he made in various fields or disciplines, and, most importantly, can provoke debate and discussion about Unaipon’s life and writing at a time when, despite his prominence as one face on Australia’s $50 note, as the namesake of Australia’s most prestigious award for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander writing, and as an author anthologised in collections of Australian and Aboriginal writing, his writing is all but ignored in Australian culture and literary criticism.'

Source: Abstract.

'Commentators such as Naomi Klein (2016) and Kim Stanley Robinson (2015) have warned that a failure now to adequately address anthropogenic climate change is an act of intergenerational theft. So great are these man-made impacts the term Anthropocene has been suggested to delineate a new epoch in the planet’s history. Australian writers are using science fiction and cli-fi, or climate fiction, to examine possible conditions faced by future generations that reflect on our current approach to the phenomenon. This paper argues that the mosaic novel, in concert with a science-fiction approach, is particularly well suited to this task in its use of interlinked short stories as a reflection of the complex elements of global climate change. My mosaic novel, “Watermarks”, being written as part of my PhD in creative writing, is set in near-future Brisbane. It draws attention to what has been identified as a relatively neglected topic in climate fiction: mitigation (Clode and Stasiak, 2014; Jordan, 2014). “Watermarks” uses a bricolage method in its construction, which also has resonance for the amorphous, interwoven aspects of anthropogenic climate change. The book adds to the small canon of other Australian writers who have used the science fictional mosaic to present visions of future life in the Anthropocene: Sue Isle’s Nightsiders (2011); James Bradley’s Clade (2015); and Steven Amsterdam’s Things We Didn’t See Coming (2009).'

Source: Abstract.

'What to do as a white middle class writer attempting to write with anti-racist and decolonialist intent? Who to use as models in the classroom and how to teach the complexity of ethics and responsibility of telling stories that challenge and undermine the accepted narratives of this nation to a predominantly white middle class cohort? This paper argues that the examples exist, authors such as Kim Scott, Bruce Pascoe, Melissa Lucaschenko, Alexis Wright and Natalie Harkin amongst many others. It is a challenging process though, ethically and creatively, to use Indigenous writers as models of approaches to story when I am not Indigenous. How to discuss these challenges in a classroom? Through an examination of my semester long subject‘Writing across borders’, a subject with Kim Scott’s novel That Deadman Dance set as the spine of the course, this paper will highlight that one of the significant challenges lies in presenting this material as already in relationship to non-Indigenous students, who up until this class had seen a division between themselves and the literature they read, and Indigenous Australian writing, declaring: ‘They aren’t writing for me’ and ‘Their stories are not mine – I can’t relate.’ With the focus on Scott’s novel came the focus on race and on Indigenous and non-Indigenous relationships in Australia and the stories told of these relationships. To support me, I drew on Fiona Nicoll’s 2004 essay ‘Are you calling me racist’ throughout the semester as guide, mentor and backstop.'

Source: Abstract.

'This research is part of a larger investigation examining female protagonists’ interactions with the ‘landscape’ in young adult fiction. It will argue that a close study of Lucy Christopher’s novel, Stolen (2009), demonstrates her use of the ‘landscape’ as a vehicle to both create and mitigate trauma for the protagonist, Gemma. This can be depicted by reading the novel in relation to two notions of environmental writing described by John Stephens (2006). The first ideological perspective Stephens describes in fiction is a human –‘landscape’ relationship where characters appear to be positioned embodying a higher status. This assumes control over the environment, creating trauma when characters face harsh ‘landscapes’. The second perspective models feelings of belonging within the ‘landscape’, prompting the protagonist to care for it. This enables characters to overcome their trauma and in doing so achieve a new sense of agency. The paper will draw on Clare Bradford’s (2008) definition of agency in young adult dystopian fiction. Bradford’s book focuses on social, institutional and cultural arrangements that produce conflict in utopian and dystopian fiction. Her ideas on agency will be applied to this research but rather than examining human-made structures that engineer conflict, this paper will consider non-human conflict represented in the novel. Then drawing from Christopher’s (2011) auto-ethnographic paper on Stolen, this research will analyse the ways that Gemma's relationship with the ‘landscape’ is the vehicle used by Christopher to reshape her character’s agency when viewed through the lens of Stephens’ (2006).'

Source: Abstract.

'This story is an extract from a chapter of the same name in Permission to Speak: An Australian Student in China, 1979-1983, a memoir that explores the continuing process of personal transformation sparked by living among Chinese people and students from different countries in early post-Mao China. As she studies modern Chinese literature at Nanjing University, the narrator acquires a growing appreciation for Chinese poetics, inflected with a western Anglophone feminist sensibility and further re-shaped by limited Chinese linguistic and cultural proficiency. ‘The Art of Travel’ is a transcultural rumination on the purpose and aesthetics of travel, and on different ways of seeing. It identifies travel as the juxtaposition of moments of intense realisation and discovery with those of extreme tedium, irritation and incomprehensibility. It explores the workings of resonance as a Sinophone sensibility in an Anglophone memoir genre.'

Source: Abstract.

'What exists at the intersection of image and word? Where does the photographer end, the writer begin? Who owns the story? “Bits of Worth”, an artefact of Worth, attempts to address such questions. Combing iPhone photos taken by LJ Maher and 1000 word stories written by Daniel Baker, Worth is an evolving collaborative narrative that skirts the borders between author and'reader. Herein, photos are curated by both creators and the constitutive elements of the greater narrative—characters, settings, plot, etc.—discussed. Part auto-writing, part fiction, part snapshot, part gallery, Worth blends lived experience and fictional reality, and, at its core, outlines a creative practice predicated on sampling, remixing, remediation, and authorised theft. Underpinned by the work of Lawrence Lessig and Henry Jenkins, Worth is positioned at a nexus of practice and theory, concerned with the historical image of the “original” artist and their relationship with economic, social, cultural factors. As such, questions of reader agency, collaborative vulnerabilities, artistic originality, and creative ownership naturally arise. Fundamentally, then, “Bits of Worth”, and its parent project part, constitutes something of a refrain, the unifying theme coded into a creative dialogue between its participants where each picture and each story is both conversation and consideration.'

Source: Abstract.

'This creative piece, Ticking the Box, is a short memoir depicting my grief as a young widow and portraying aspects of the journey of recovery from that loss. The opening scene shows having to tick the box ‘widowed’ for the first time on an official form shortly after my husband’s death and then explores my response to the unwanted identity of ‘young widow’. This includes the first solo visit for dinner at the home of a befriended couple, conveying the awkwardness felt by all. A flashback takes the reader back to when my husband and I first met each other in Egypt, where we were both traveling as young backpackers. It depicts the first days spent together against the stunning backdrop of the temples in Luxor and concludes with the buying of an artefact, which now sits on my bedside table, a tangible connection to the past. The text explores how to integrate the memories of the past, of twenty years spent together, into the future in a way that offers the past as well as the future its own space. This work explores issues of identity, grief and premature loss. It recognises the dead as vulnerable subjects and strives for an ethical representation of the deceased.'

Source: Abstract.

'There is very little scholarly research on the effects of their parents’ overseas work on the children of missionaries. These children may spend many years living in challenging cross cultural settings, and most move home frequently (Pollock & Van Reken 2009). Some have multiple separations from parents, siblings and extended family, while a number are caught up in violent civil wars or experience other trauma such as regular exposure to the effects of extreme poverty. ‘Home’ can be a slippery construct. This creative piece, part of a life-writing research project, examines how memories are constructed and maintained and the ways in which memory-triggers, in particular photographs and landscapes, can contribute to self-understanding.'

Source: Abstract.

'‘Lenora Jane Frayne’ comprises two small sections from a larger work of creative non-fiction and fiction, Faith, Hope and Stubborn Pride: Searching for Heaven in Aotearoa and Australia (2016), based on my research into my family history. Much of this larger work is written from traditional research and conforms to the tenets of biographical writing in that statements are supported by facts and evidence. Some sections of the larger work, however, are purely imagined, though inspired by known facts and historical evidence. They are my attempts to cast light where my traditional research provided none. On one hand I have stolen the identity of family members whom I never knew and used them in fictional narratives; on the other hand I have used what facts I could uncover from historical sources to create a biographical narrative. ‘Lenora Jane Frayne’ offers an example of the imagined as well as a more traditional biographical sketch.'

Source: Abstract.

'In 1948, after many years living with the Wonguri-Mandjigai people, Ronald M. Berndt published an English language translation of a non sacred song of the Sand-fly Clan: the Song Cycle of The Moon-Bone. In 1977 Les Murray wrote his own version based on the Berndt translation The Buladelah-Taree Holiday Song Cycle, a white man's revision. 2016: Murray’s revision gets a revision, a homosemantic emulation (a translation from English into English retaining the cadence, mood and sound). Aboriginal To Nowhere transgresses Murray’s vision of city folk holidaying on grandma’s farm and signals a contemporary poetry of dispossession and anti-sentiment, ventures into transliminal territory and explores those in-between places of perpetual generational change; it is a text hyperaware of incremental shifts in the semiotic simulation humans call reality.'

Source: Abstract.

'‘That danged gizmo’ emerges from collaborative practice between two culturally diverse authors: a retired American living in Georgia, and an African Australian living in Melbourne. The writerly alliance sees one author focus on characterisation (‘deep south’ dialogue), and the other on literary elements (playfulness with language, style and structure), both in quests to contribute to the quality of form in the work of science fiction. Each author approaches the writing with their own knowledge, their own biases, their own craft. Together, while navigating inherent challenges in multiplicity of voice, the artists reinvent discrete ideas and apply creative practice into a collective storytelling. Collaborative practice is a type of theft where literature is made up, where a multiplicity is endowed with significance. The success of multi-authored work relies on the participants’ ability to negotiate their diversity, adopt each other’s creativity and engender uniqueness to an artistic formation that is singular, seamless to the reader. In a contemporary context of digital and cyber realms, ‘That danged gizmo’ borrows from science fiction as a kind of hyperreality, where a machine destabilizes the relationship between a man and his wife.'

Source: Abstract.

'All aesthetics of appropriation entail acts of transgression predicated on the art of citational writing, from allusion to punning, quotation, pastiche, parody, sampling, remix and homage. ‘ωitational writing underscores the double movement of quotation,’ writes Della Pollock in a now famous paper on performativity (Pollock 1998:94), affirming that ‘it stages its own citationality, re-sighting citation, displaying it in an accumulation of quotations or self quotations ... with the primary effect of reclaiming citation for affiliation’ (Pollock 1998: 94) my emphasis). As such, aesthetics of appropriation presuppose the existence of both Other and other and cannot be deemed nihilistic as has often been suggested, especially in the context of critiques of postmodernism. Notwithstanding their intent, aesthetics of appropriation tacitly attribute to language both an evocative and communicatory dimension. But what lies beyond the drive for ‘affiliation’ intimated by Pollock? ‘Crimes of letters: the crow, the fox and me’ explores the kinship between textuality and felony—real or imagined—within the authorised context of the reader-response contract, however misprisioned. The wager of this ‘creative artful fact,’ otherwise called artefact, is for ‘authorised theft’ to exceed what one might be reluctant to call ‘original’ material after Harold Bloom returned the course of philological forays into textual begetting back to anxieties of influence (Bloom 1973).'

Source: Abstract.

'This suite of poems from The Bangalore Set engages with the fields of postcolonial ethnography and arts-based inquiry. The result of a creative collaboration between an Australian writer/ethnographer and a range of people she encountered while in residence in Bangalore, India, the compositional process behind the poems indicates how arts-based methods can effect balance between the traditional binary of Researcher and Researched within ethnographic studies. Presented chronologically, the poems track Kathryn Hummel’s progression from observer to participant to interpreter of others’ lives in and views of the city, demonstrating how creative collaboration might shift ethnography away from its divisive colonial origins towards a practice more suited to contemporary postcolonial contexts.'

Source: Abstract.

' Ten poems are presented, sampling my PhD research and exploring how poetry might harmonise ‘Western’ scientific and ‘Eastern’ spiritual worldviews. The poems invite a liminal consciousness where science’s epistemic authority may meet on equal—not privileged—terms with the more ancient authorities of body and Earth. My chosen primary foci are modern physics, philosophical Daoism, and the ecosystemic perspective afforded by complexity theory (Capra & Luisi 2014), in which large-scale patterns emerge unpredictably from relatively simple processes. This emergence, as Smith (2006: 172) remarks, is helpful in theorising how an artwork frequently ‘develops its own autonomous identity and ... takes the creator in directions quite different from his or her original intentions.’ My methodology carries this further by seeking to abandon intention entirely. To achieve this I choose randomly from lists of sources and writing experiments. Influenced by found poetry (Perloff 2012) and by the aleatory processes of conceptual writing and LANGUAGE poetry (Dworki n.d.; James 2012), I appropriate, combine and re-present ideas and text from creative and non-fictional works. I take words from books or from what Tobin (2004: 126) calls the mind’s ‘other place’ of poetry. A poem may or may not emerge; if one does, I have little idea what it may say or do. I work with eyes and fingers, pointing, highlighting, cutting and shuffling. I select and place text using body and instinct, not the thinking self. This non-intentional composition strives for the Daoist ideal of wei wuwei, action without action—egoless, selfless, apparently-effortless action. Moeller (2004) likens wei wuwei to Csíkszentmihályi’s (1990) concept of flow, the focused, effortless mental state also called ‘the zone’. Aspiring to become daojia shiren, ‘poet of Philosophical Daoism’, I practise yun you,‘wandering like a cloud’, ‘searching everywhere’ for the Way (Chen & Ji 2016: 178, 188).'

Source: Abstract.

'In this text, the plot of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet has been recrafted as a poem incorporating the advice given to Italian princes by Niccolò Machiavelli, the most infamous political theorist of the 16th century. Shakespeare’s 1597 Romeo and Juliet play was based on an Italian tale, told and retold by Italian writers, the most important of whom were Masuccio Salernitano (born in 1410), Luigi da Porto (born in 1485) and Matteo Bandello (born in 1480). Bandello’s novellas were translated into French by Pierre Boaistuau (born in 1517) and François de Belleforest (born in 1530). These French translations, in turn, were translated into English by William Painter (born 1540) and Arthur Brooke (born 1563). Literary critics agree that the primary source of inspiration for Shakespeare’s play was Brooke’s narrative poem, titled The Tragicall Historye of Romeus and Juliet, which condemns the young lovers for neglecting the authority of their parents. By taking a poetic leap, using fragments, insights and variations of the original Italian novellas and their translations, the poem will attempt to unveil the Italian flavour of the plot, lost behind all those rewritings, reinterpretations and well-intended but nefarious distortions which embellished the tale beyond recognition. Adding a layer of realpolitik inspired by the writings of Machiavelli, the raw political moral of the story will become apparent, almost.'

Source: Abstract.

'When future researchers look back on this generation seeking to understand our culture and society, the internet will be a rich source of archival study. We as a culture have begun to digitise not only our records and our history, but also ourselves. Contemporary internet users construct digital ‘bodies’ through social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram –performing their personalities in order to participate in the online culture – while tracking bots and cookies monitor our use of the online space in order to predict which advertisements will be most effective. It is through this combination of deliberate construction and the (somewhat neutral) reflections of man-made, coded interpreters that our online ‘selves’ form. The purpose of this creative work is to explore identity-constructing practices in the online space, to reflect on the ways that the online archive can be read, and to develop an experimental non-fiction work using the internet as a base medium. The work takes the form of a travel memoir, told through a combination of my social media outputs and internet history between November 18, 2015, and March 1, 2016. I have selectively compiled posts and archived pages in order to produce what I consider to be an authentic representation of my experience, constructing a narrative of myself born from my deliberate social media posts and my internet history of that time, which gives the reader a glimpse into my mental state while I was travelling.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'This creative paper contains an extract of Lifeline––a short thriller play presented in the 2016 Adelaide Fringe. Lifeline explores the ramifications of metadata retention and social media information falling into the hands of a character with malicious intentions, in the case ofthe play, a character called ‘Lewis’, who uses the personal information of a man named ‘Guy’ to manipulate him into performing heinous acts. The extract details the section of the play following the opening, where Lewis begins to reveal the far-reaching consequences of being able to access Guy’s personal information through a combination of his details (birthdate, full name, address) and billing information (banking details, credit card information, and purchase history). The play explores the consequences of storing personal details in a mediatized environment, and the consequences of not understanding the legislation that is designed around personal identity. It also details other aspects of cyberspaces that are often misunderstood––the Darkweb, the ease in which someone can steal personal information, and how unsecure information is when there is access to metadata through telecommunications services.'

Source: Abstract.