'This article proposes a reading of Alexis Wright’s epic novel Carpentaria that focuses on the mine and its impacts as central to any understanding of the novel. Carpentaria offers a stark portrayal of how resource extraction is intimately linked with both colonisation and capitalism and is sustained through state-sanctioned violence and nationalist ideologies. This article explores the dichotomy between Normal Phantom, who views mining as just another phenomenon in the vast expanse of time, and his son Will, who fights the mine on the understanding that it is an unprecedented threat to the survival of the Waanyi people and their Country. Although I suggest that this wider debate, and the forms of agency it represents, remains unresolved in the novel, I conclude with a meditation on the critically neglected character of Kevin who complicates the novel’s uneasy resolution. In the light of ongoing debates about the Adani mine, Carpentaria is more relevant than ever.' (Publication abstract)
'Helen Garner’s literary non-fiction book This House of Grief (2014), as well as her two essays ‘Why She Broke’ (2017) and ‘Killing Daniel’ (1993), all deal with instances of filicide. This article begins by offering a reading of these writings in which I argue that they perpetuate a mythologisation of family violence which prevents us from viewing that violence as an ameliorable social injustice. I look at Rita Felski’s injunction to engage more deeply with what she calls ‘ordinary readers'’ uses of literature as a way to question the relevance of the kind of critique put forth in the first section; ultimately, I find that the context of Garner’s popular reception actually vindicates a critical focus on the political import of the writing.' (Publication abstract)
'After the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC) was established in 1932, music occupied just over half of airtime, with talk making up the balance. With the gradual evolution of literary content on Australian radio, novels and plays were adapted, serialised or commissioned, and there were competitions and book readings. Based on fine-grained newspaper and archival research, this article considers the development of book criticism and discussions on ABC radio. It covers the period from the mid-1920s, as individual ‘A-class’ stations experimented with literary broadcasts in the years before the formation of the ABC, to the mid-1960s, after the deaths of critics Vance and Nettie Palmer, who are central to this article. It examines how Australian literature was placed within the context of world literature by ABC radio broadcasters ranging from Frederick T. Macartney and George Farwell to Norman Robb and Colin Roderick. In exploring the ABC’s pioneering and crucial role in the Australian literary ecology, the article also demonstrates how the ABC provided women with considerable opportunities as both critics and writers.' (Publication abstract)
'This article uses Lacanian psychoanalysis to look past the enormous contextual differences between the politically-motivated mass murders and consequent genocide of the Maya in Guatemala during the Civil War, and the frontier massacres in Australia during colonisation, to locate important commonalities. In Horacio Castellanos Moya’s 2004 novel Senselessness, it identifies a libidinal investment in a Maya and Latin American Other as the site of the excessive enjoyment that Lacan calls jouissance: a projection responsible for love, hate and all varieties of discrimination. It identifies a similar investment in an Aboriginal Other in Mark McKenna’s 2002 nonfiction book Looking for Blackfellas’ Point. Castellanos Moya creates a narrator whose intense libidinal investment in the Maya Other’s suffering reveals not only the limits of reconciliation in Guatemala, but also how libidinal investments in Latin America as a site of literary jouissance trap the region between magic and violence. McKenna unearths a local narrative of denial in which Aboriginal Australians are cast as villains; this points to an ambivalent national narrative where Aboriginal Australians are either victims or victimisers, but always exceptional. What connects Guatemala, Australia and the world is a collective responsibility for the production of Others – of and for whom violence is expected.' (Publication abstract)
'Commentators have been quick to recognise Wafer, Item’s protagonist, as a Christ-figure, and to discuss aspects of what Roslynn Haynes perceived to be a ‘plethora of religious and universal imagery’. Another critical stream has focused on aspects of the novel’s feminism that oppose the masculinist industrial complex. This article contends that an ambiguous exploration of Christian faith and hope, conducted in a context of profound human suffering and moral failure, is central to An Item from the Late News.
'Wafer’s story offers eccentric and disorderly parallels to episodes in the Gospels before climaxing with a brutality comparable to the crucifixion. Yet the aftermath, an unrealised resurrection, connotes agnosticism. Wafer and his female ‘disciples’ Gabby and Emmie are eccentric renditions of Gospel figures who reflect their originals more closely than previous commentary has acknowledged. Above all, Item debates Christian faith through dense clusters of figures that surface throughout the text. They include Christmas; circles in place and time; the moon and the communion wafer; fire and light; darkness, hell and horned devils; Wafer’s sapphire; nakedness; and nothingness. Some clusters, notably circles with their connotations of infinity, make the transition into metaphysics. In sum, events, characterisation and figures uphold Astley’s claim, in a private letter, that she wrote An Item from the Late News ‘with a longing for Christian ideals’.' (Publication abstract)
'This paper draws on interviews conducted as part of the Australian Research Council funded Discovery project Investigating Literary Knowledge in the Making of English Teachers. Those interviews inquire into the role of literary knowing in the professional learning of early career English teachers, focusing specifically on their experiences as they make the transition, via teacher education programmes, from university students of English to school teachers. We have also been interested in how key institutional settings, practices and policies might have shaped their experiences of literary education at tertiary level; the knowledge and values they bring to their work as English teachers; and the professional learning they undergo in their first years of teaching. The aim of this article is to present an exploration of ‘literary sociability’, a working concept of the project for identifying and exploring ways of literary meaning making that might have particular relevance and use for understanding early career English teachers’ experiences across the settings of their education and work.' (Publication abstract)
'Locating Australian Literary Memory begins with a typically pithy quotation from Miles Franklin about its subject matter: ‘Such monuments, alas, too often are a saving of face by the living in regard to the neglected dead’. Many of the eleven Australian writers focused on by Brigid Magner were indeed neglected during their lifetimes, and most, even if achieving popularity at one time, are little read today. They include a number whose work would still be regarded as canonical, such as Joseph Furphy, Henry Handel Richardson, Henry Lawson, ‘Banjo’ Paterson, Katharine Susannah Prichard and Eleanor Dark, along with two best-known for their books for children, Nan Chauncy and P. L. Travers. Novelist Kylie Tennant, Indigenous author David Unaipon and poet Adam Lindsay Gordon make up the rest of the group, all of whom were writing mainly in the nineteenth through to the mid-twentieth centuries.' (Publication abstract)
'Writing a history of literary criticism is undoubtedly challenging in that it requires the writer’s expertise in two aspects: how to unify both theoretical and practical criticism; and how to objectively, accurately and comprehensively give a succinct account of key information in the face of a vast amount of literature. Peng addresses these issues by pursuing a narrative pattern which includes a macro-level portrayal of social and cultural contexts, a meso-level analysis of literary events and cultural debates, and a micro-level interpretation of four individual critics’ ideas about Australian literature in every phase of the development.' (Publication abstract)
'Scholarly research on book history and contemporary publishing has expanded significantly since the 1990s. Book Publishing in Australia: A Living Legacy draws on a wide range of print and digital resources, and builds on the work of three earlier volumes: Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia 1946–2005, edited by Craig Munro and Robyn Sheahan-Bright (University of Queensland Press, 2006); Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing, edited by David Carter and Anne Galligan (University of Queensland Press, 2007); and The Return of Print? Contemporary Australian Publishing, edited by Aaron Mannion and Emmett Stinson (Monash University Publishing, 2016).' (Publication abstract)
