y separately published work icon Antipodes periodical issue   peer reviewed assertion
Issue Details: First known date: 2020... vol. 34 no. 2 2020 of Antipodes est. 1987 Antipodes
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'This issue marks another significant moment of this journal’s evolution. Just a few years ago, Nicholas Birns moved on from the editor position, after eighteen years of dedicated service. As you can see in this issue, with an interview with Donna Coates, he remains a vital contributor to Antipodes—and behind the scenes, he continues to be a valuable resource for this editor.' (Editorial introduction)

Contents

* Contents derived from the 2020 version. Please note that other versions/publications may contain different contents. See the Publication Details.
A Note on Anne Elder's Scenario for Summer, Paul Kane , single work essay

'For years the poet Anne Elder (1918–1976) was best known for the Anne Elder Award, a prominent literary prize for a first book of poems (similar in prestige to the Yale Younger Poets Prize in the United States). That obscuration of the poet herself has changed of late, with her inclusion in poetry anthologies (by Puncher and Wattmann and the University of New South Wales Press) and particularly with the joint publication in 2018 of a new selection of her poems, The Bright and the Cold (edited by her daughter, Catherine Elder), and a biography, The Heart's Ground (by Julia Hamer). Anne Elder's first career was as a ballet dancer in the Borovansky Company in Melbourne, but her debut collection of poems, For the Record (1972), marked her immediately as a poet of distinction. After her early death, a posthumous volume was published by Angus and Robertson, Crazy Woman and Other Poems (1977), though plans for a collected poems never materialized.' (Introduction)

(p. 167-168)
Scenario for Summer : Verses for Broadcasting, Paul Kane , single work prose (p. 169-177)
A Day of Some Confluencei"The day began with her", Dennis Nicholson , single work poetry (p. 178-179.)
Modernity in the Antipodes : Politics and Aesthetics in Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney, Naish Gawen , single work criticism
'Having grown up in Sydney in the first decades of the twentieth century, Christina Stead left Australia in 1928 at the age of twenty-six and returned only forty years later. Critical responses to Stead’s work tended to repress her Australianness, even when those critical responses came from Australians themselves; in 1948, Nettie Palmer commented on walking past an “impressive shopfront showing American and English classics and moderns in good editions: Shakespeare, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Whitman, Quixote (English), Christina Stead, Thackeray” (Palmer 149). Stead’s first novel, Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), is the least ambiguously Australian of all her works, centered on a group of workers at a printing press in Sydney in the 1920s. This novel is important in the history of Australian literary fiction, arriving early in the development of an ossified split between modernist and realist modes—a split that was to become a defining schism of Australian literature in the subsequent decades. The social, political, and cultural tensions that fed the perceived split between modernist and realist writing in Australia—tensions that revolved around the role of organized left-wing politics in social life and the relationship of Australia to modernity and empire—receive a deep and extended treatment in Stead’s novel. These tensions play out at a formal level in the coexistence of both realist and modernist strategies of representation in Stead’s novel, strategies deeply influenced by Stead’s reading of both nineteenth-century French realist fiction and the modernist avant-garde. The challenge when reading Seven Poor Men of Sydney is to be sensitive to both the European literary and intellectual tradition that undoubtedly nourished her work and the Australian context out of which it was born.'
(p. 180-199)
Contemporary Historical Fiction and Kate Grenville's A Room Made of Leaves, Charlotte Guest , single work criticism

'This essay situates the recent return to referentiality and authenticity in contemporary historical fiction in the context of the current climate of global literary culture, which is concerned with ideas of identity, positionality, proximity, and authenticity. This return is guided by a refreshed ethics of literary production, a renewed sense of moral obligation to represent the past truthfully and earnestly, while maintaining postmodernism's skepticism toward the production and construction of historical narratives. Some contemporary historical novels have (re)assumed the responsibility of demonstrating to the general reading public how histories are written and, by extension, propose an ethical and critical engagement with the past that aligns with the shift in political and cultural sensibilities we have witnessed over the past decade. The case study in this essay is A Room Made of Leaves (2020) by Kate Grenville, a critically acclaimed Australian historical novelist.' (Publication abstract)

(p. 200-216)
Troublei"when we were little", Edith Speers , single work poetry (p. 217)
Art Mistressi"Her zoographic counterpart", Jena Woodhouse , single work poetry (p. 218-219)
Solitudei"Out beyond heart attack survivability range,", Damen O'Brien , single work poetry (p. 220-221)
All You Have to Do Is Look : An Interview with Donna Coates, Nicholas Birns (interviewer), single work interview

'Donna Coates is an associate professor at the University of Calgary, is a long-term member of the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies, and has served on the editorial board of Antipodes. She has published many articles on the topic of war, especially women in war, a field that she pioneered in the national literatures of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. She has taught and lectured frequently world-wide and has visited Australia many times. Donna also serves as the primary editor of the seven-volume Women and War (History of Feminism) series published by Routledge in 2020 and edited Sharon Pollock: First Woman of Canadian Theatre, published in 2015 with the University of Calgary Press. She coedited Canada and the Theatre of War, volume 1 (2008) and volume 2 (2010), with Sherrill Grace. Her publications also include two books coauthored with George Melnyk: Wild Words: Essays on Alberta Literature (2009) and Writing Alberta: Building on a Literature Identity (2017). Donna is currently completing a book on Australian women's war fictions.' (Introduction)

(p. 222-232)
The Eurocentric Gaze, Postcolonial Gothic, Indigenous Visions, Eva Rueschmann , single work criticism

'In keeping with Antipodes's focus on literary and other cultural texts from the Pacific region, this special section features six new essays on Australian and New Zealand fictional feature and documentary films. While Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand are separate and distinct national cinemas, this section's coverage of narrative films from both nations reflects a tradition of scholarship based on the significant cultural crossovers between them. Beyond the nations' common origins as former British colonies and their Pacific location, Australian and New Zealand filmmakers have both drawn on their respective settler histories and postsettler social development as multicultural nations for narrative subjects and inspiration. Ian Conrich has noted that "Australian and New Zealand cinema share a use of powerful landscapes, they also share a post-settler Gothic, a cinema of isolation and travel, similar screen representations of masculinity, and similar fictional depictions of small-town communities" (5). An expanded list of commonalities includes the important rise since the early 2000s of Indigenous film and filmmakers in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand alike, which Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye called in A Companion to Australian Cinema (2019) a necessary challenge to the previously dominant "uninterrupted whiteness of Australian screen culture" (37).' (Introduction)

(p. 233-241)
Countering the Eurocentric Gaze? Europe in the Antipodean Filmic Imagination, Janine Hauthala , single work criticism
'This article explores how Europe is depicted in contemporary Antipodean films by drawing on the example of An Angel at my Table (1990), Romulus, My Father (2007), Mr. Pip (2012), and Dead Europe (2012). The comparative case study of these cinematic adaptations shows, first, how (British) literature shapes the protagonists' encounter with Europe. Second, the author examines whether the films perpetuate or counter the Eurocentric gaze. She argues that Campion and Roxburgh highlight characters' diasporic longing for, and their catalytic or unhealthy attachment to, Europe as "imaginary homeland." Adamson's adaptation, in turn, decenters Eurocentric visions, while Krawitz's portrayal of Europe as "traumascape" rejects the alleged superiority of an idealized Europe even more forcefully than Tsiolkas's novel does. Of the four films, only Mr. Pip visually engages postcolonial discourses and, at least indirectly, relates to the settler colonial contexts to which all four films belong. Ultimately, the films' shared engagement with Europe broadens the national focus of earlier Antipodean cinema, offering various avenues to rethink identity and belonging beyond the national and the postcolonial.'  (Publication abstract)
(p. 242-261)
"The House Will Come to You" : Domestic Architecture in Contemporary Australian Literature and Film, Ella Jeffery , Emma Doolan , single work criticism
'The house has long been an archetypal site of Gothic terror and entrapment. The Gothic dwelling is one of the most steadfast conventions of the mode, shifting as the Gothic has shifted through history to encompass a range of sites, from castles to cabins, speaking to ongoing anxieties about the security and stability of the home, nation, family, or self. The Gothic’s “relentlessly ‘architectural’ obsessions” (Castle 88) have been well documented, and Gothic buildings are frequently read as psychological as much as physical spaces. The Gothic edifice functions as a “sensation-machine” (Castle 88) capable of generating the sublime feeling of being overwhelmed by a greater power. The Gothic house, operating on a smaller scale, has likewise been associated with overarching power structures such as the nation, family, or—in the Female Gothic—patriarchy.' (Publication abstract)
(p. 277-295)
History, Recognition, and the Trauma of Indigenous Enjoyment in The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith, Laurent Shervington , single work criticism
'The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith (1978), directed by Fred Schepisi, is an Australian New Wave film about a young Indigenous Australian man’s struggle for recognition in pre-federation Australia, a futile pursuit that leads him to commit acts of violence against his colonial oppressors, an event based on the 1900 Breelong murders. It is this element of violence, in particular, the first act against the Newby family, that emerges as a paradoxical element that has troubled many critics of the film. Several immediate local reviewers of the film specifically addressed this aspect, claiming that the violent act “unbalances” the film (Jennings 26) and feels “overprepared and under-defined” (Connolly, qtd. in Donnar) and that otherwise “there seems insufficient reason” for it (Coster, qtd. in Donnar). The film’s violence also led to difficulties in its international marketing, with its inclusion in the United Kingdom’s “Section 3 Video Nasties” list of VHS films liable to be seized and confiscated, as well as having to be reedited in order to be released in the United States.' (Introduction)
(p. 296-312)
Cathy FREEMAN : Trailblazer, Black Activist, Kuku Yalanji Woman, Felicity Collins , single work criticism

'In 2020, FREEMAN became the most-watched documentary in Australia. This article situates the film's intercultural, multivocal, and multiperspectival story of Cathy Freeman's gold-medal win at the Sydney 2000 Olympics in three contemporary contexts: the Trailblazers collection of sports documentaries that entertained Australians during COVID-19 lockdowns; the Black Lives Matter protests in Australia cities and towns that defied COVID- 19 bans in 2020 and provided a context for remembering Cathy Freeman as a Black activist in the 1990s; and a First Nations context that recognizes Freeman as a Kuku Yalanji woman whose public roles have helped to transform the terms of stranger relationality between Indigenous, settler-colonial, and immigrant Australians.' (Publication abstract)

(p. 313-328)
Light Observationsi"A buffeting—", Andrew Lansdown , single work poetry (p. 346-347)
Mudi"At the creek’s flood plain", Sam Morley , single work poetry (p. 348)
A Tin Kettlingi"They wander across paddocks banging saucepans.", Brendan Ryan , single work poetry (p. 349)
Eastern Seagull Poemi"Even seagulls have Zen days", Susanne Kennedy , single work poetry (p. 350)
Interval North, Dominique Hecq , single work prose

'The East Alligator River snakes through high spear grass, open eucalypt woodlands, and paperbark forests to the tidal flats, where pandanus palms dig their roots in the mud. A nomination error: there were and are no alligators, only saltwater crocodiles. They cruise alongside our boat or laze around in the sun on mud flats.' (Introduction)

(p. 351-360)
Somebody's Child, Jena Woodhouse , single work prose (p. 361-366)

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Last amended 4 Apr 2022 13:33:50
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