Cirrus@Austlit

'This article examines three collections of Australian fairy tales published between 1897 and 1925 and considers the ways in which they contributed to nation-building efforts. Atha Westbury’s Australian Fairy Tales (1897), J. M. Whitfeld’s The Spirit of the Bush Fire and Other Australian Fairy Tales (1898), and Hume Cook’s Australian Fairy Tales (1925) fantasise a nation into being through the fairy-tale genre. The associations of the European fairy-tale tradition with a distant past (‘once upon a time’) are mobilised to create a ‘ready-made’ set of traditions and cultural explanations through which the implied Australian child can understand a nation that was only federated in 1901. This ranged from creating origin stories for natural landmarks like J. M. Whitfeld, through to imagining well-developed fairy cities in the most isolated parts of Australia, far from the eyes of white settlers, as in Atha Westbury and Hume Cook’s collections. Stories by Cook and Westbury blur the distinction between fairy-tale characters and First Nations people, at once yoking imported traditions to the enduring history of First Nations peoples and replacing them in the cultural imaginary with mythical characters who have never existed.' (Publication abstract)

'In a 2019 article in The Guardian, Gomeroi poet, essayist and legal scholar Alison Whittaker declared ‘Blak literature is in a golden age. Our white audiences, who are majorities in both literary industry and buying power, are deep in an unseen crisis of how to deal with it.’ This essay tries to understand what constitutes the crisis, how settler readers, like me, might see it and emerge from it, and what some of the stakes are. I consider the reading crisis in relation to the dominant model for reading testimonial literature established by Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub, which positions the reader/listener as empathetic co-owner of the speaker’s trauma and powerful enabler of their testimony. Following Libby Porter, I contend settlers can progress to ‘more mature ways of responding to the invitation to a sovereign relationship.’ I discuss three strategies settler readers can implement to this end: focus on the presence of the writer, position themselves as outsiders wanting to listen and recognise themselves as implicated subjects. I ground the discussion in the 2015 life-history text Not Just Black and White: A Conversation between a Mother and Daughter by Murri women Lesley Williams and Tammy Williams.' (Publication abstract)

'Once overlooked in Australian literature, recent writing from Western Sydney is now among the field’s most dynamic and vital. Over the past two decades, Western Sydney, one of Australia’s most culturally and linguistically diverse communities, has also become a locus for Islamophobia, racism and anti-multicultural sentiment. This sentiment was bolstered by John Howard’s Coalition government between 1996 and 2007 through the creation of a ‘citizen norm’ mythologising Anglo-Celtic identity, normative expressions of masculinity, and neoliberal individualism (Johnson 197). This period also saw a sharp rise in discrimination against Muslim Australians following the MV Tampa controversy, the fabricated ‘Children Overboard’ scandal, the September 11 attacks on New York City, and the trial and conviction of a group of young Lebanese Muslim men, led by Bilal Skaf, for a series of violent gang rapes perpetrated against young women in Sydney. In this essay, I read three works by writers from Western Sydney as resistance to Howard’s citizen norm: Luke Carman’s An Elegant Young Man (2013), Peter Polites’s Down the Hume (2017) and Michael Mohammed Ahmad’s The Lebs (2018). I examine the works’ depictions of suburban locality and masculinity in the context of Howard-era multicultural Australia.' (Publication abstract)

'Embracing the environmental, eco-materialist and planetary turn in the humanities, prompted by the Anthropocene, this paper offers a reading of Voss as an environmental and planetary epic. The unique environmental qualities of Patrick White’s writing, and his later-life activism, have perhaps suffered due to a focus on the psychological and spiritual aspects of his biography. Reading Voss as a journey ‘into the dust’ (213), away from colonial Sydney, and associated Eurocentric forms, this paper argues that the very material and elemental nature of the Australian environment emerges as an agentive and subversive presence, suggested by the insidiously small, yet itinerant dust. White’s journey inland, into the ‘kingdom of dust’ (297), shatters, fragments, and erodes the stable, the terran and the fixed, but through that very reduction, the story becomes engrained in elemental and planetary forces. The disruptive aesthetics, connected to the drying of the material environment and the desert, immerses the reader in an errant environment in motion. This paper argues that the epic qualities of the story are imparted through this very contact with the environment, the elemental and the planetary, positioning Voss as a planetary epic.' (Publication abstract) 

'Stuart Cooke and Peter Denney’s edited collection, Transcultural Ecocriticism: Global, Romantic and Decolonial Perspectives (Bloomsbury, 2021) offers a series of case studies on how the practice and study of literature responds to global ecological crisis. The emphasis on the ‘decolonial’ dimension of transcultural ecocriticism places the book in the field of postcolonial ecocriticism. The opening section of the book, ‘Planetary Localities’ invokes the key dialectic of Ursula Heise’s influential Sense of Place and Sense of Planet (2008). The second section, ‘Beyond the Romantic Frontier’ encompasses scholarship on eighteenth and nineteenth century cultures and imaginaries. The theme of the third and final section of the book is ‘Decolonial Poetics’ and focuses on case studies from Australia and Latin America.' (Publication abstract)