Cirrus@Austlit

'Fifteen years ago, the new Rudd government announced the creation of the Prime Minister’s Literary Awards (PMLAs), to be administered by the Minister for the Arts. There were two prizes at the outset – fiction and non-fiction – each worth $100,000 – tax free to boot. Given the precarious incomes of most Australian writers, the prizes could not have been more welcome. Later, after some lobbying, young adult and children’s fiction were added, followed by poetry and Australian history. Sensibly, like other literary prizes, the PMLA organisers decided in 2011 to reward all the shortlisted authors, not just the winner.'  (Introduction)

'Grace Tame was sixteen years old, and it was 2011, when the first account of the repeated sexual assault and child abuse she had endured as a victim of her fifty-eight-year-old high school maths teacher, Nicolaas Bester, appeared in her local newspaper, the Hobart Mercury. She was hanging out with two close friends, their parents were at work, and she thinks it was probably the school holidays. The headline (‘Teacher Admits to Affair with Student’) was accompanied by ‘a huge picture of his face’ and a ‘romanticised description’ of the first time her abuser had exposed himself to her.' (Introduction)

'In the 1990s, seeing a ‘hot-red weapon’ of a motorbike being ridden into the News Corp car park in Sydney, journalist Paddy Manning could not help but ask, ‘What’s that?’ Still wearing his helmet, the rider answered that the bike was an MV Agusta – at which point Manning realised he had yelled at Lachlan Murdoch.' (Introduction) 

'The Australian Museum is starting to develop something of a literary landscape of its own. This is not so much through official publications such as Ronald Strahan’s Rare and Curious Specimens (1979) or the flagship magazine in its various incarnations from Australian Natural History to Explore. Rather, it is through more creative or expansive stories of the weird, wonderful, and personable, from Tim Flannery’s amusingly fictionalised historical recounting of The Mystery of the Venus Island Fetish (2014) to James Bradley’s disturbing future fiction The Deep Field (1999). Museum spaces – front and back of house – have an intriguing capacity to inspire and document their own strange and evolving histories.' (Introduction) 

'In the introduction to her book about Bryce Courtenay (1933–2012), Christine Courtenay writes: ‘To be Bryce’s wife was both a joy and a privilege, and I remain proud of the contribution I made to our years together. Not long after we became a couple, he said, “I love you very deeply and we make a fantastic team, but you do realise you have taken on a full-time job looking after me? Plus, for seven months a year you’re a writer’s widow while you wait for me to finish each book.”’ It is a paragraph that reveals something about their relationship, including its power balance.' (Introduction) 

'When I began work on A Maker of Books, I had no idea that Alec Bolton had succeeded ‘Peter Pica’ (the publisher and bookseller Andrew Fabinyi) as a pseudonymous critic of Australian book design and production for Australian Book Review. He called himself ‘Martin Em’. I had set out to explore in detail Alec’s achievement as a letterpress printer of distinction at his private Brindabella Press, and also his long career in Australian publishing, but this was an unexpected discovery. The clue was a letter from Alec to John McLaren, the then editor of ABR, which I found in a completely unrelated file in the Alec Bolton papers at the National Library of Australia. When I looked at Martin Em’s ‘BookShapes’ columns, published between 1978 and 1982, Alec’s distinctive voice was quite apparent.' (Introduction) 

'In American culture, the baseball novel is virtually a genre unto itself, baseball offering a metaphor through which the American dream – the rise and fall and rise again of unlikely heroes – might be interrogated. The prologue of Don DeLillo’s Underworld (1997) offers a stunning example: within all the noise and spectacle of a baseball final an entire nation, as it teeters on the edge of the atomic age, is apprehended.' (Introduction) 

'The accordion, or squeezebox, takes its name from the German Akkordeon, meaning a ‘musical chorus’ or ‘chorus of sounds’. This box-shaped aerophonic instrument makes music when keys on its sides are pressed, one side mostly melody, the other chords. Squeezing the instrument and playing with both hands, the musician dexterously produces polyphonous music.' (Introduction) 

'Early in The Sun Walks Down, Mary Wallace – mother to six-year-old Denny, who has gone missing in a dust storm – throws her husband a ‘general look of bafflement at having found herself here, in this place, with these people’. It’s a symptomatic moment early in a novel that contains myriad displays of perplexity by various characters – at each other, at situations they create or must navigate, at the meaning of life.' (Introduction)

'What is a short short story? More specifically, how short is it (or how long)? The most famous tiny example is attributed to Ernest Hemingway: ‘For sale: baby shoes, never worn.’ Whether he wrote this or not, it represents the gold standard in suggesting much in little. Like poetry, microstories or flash fictions allow no formal wobbling as authors tread a perilous tightrope between banality and inspired ingenuity.' (Introduction)

'These strange years of pandemic and lockdowns certainly brought challenges and unusual experiences – those of constraint but also, surprisingly, of opportunity and richness. The curious spaces we occupy in the ether have become a seedbed for conversation and exchange; for connections that otherwise might not have found a field in which to prosper. Despite or perhaps because of the limits of the digital, perhaps even because we were undistracted by physical proximity, these spaces seemed to offer the potential for a raw honesty – lacunae of sotto voce conversations which brought us ironically into a form of seemingly unmediated communication. From the hermetically sealed bubble of lockdowns, digital connect took on the intensity of embodied dialogue, the intimate voice in the ear.' (Introduction) 

'Maps are central to Kim Mahood’s practice as a writer, artist, and intercultural collaborator. She began making them in the wake of her father’s death in a helicopter mustering accident thirty years ago. This tragic event compelled her to make a pilgrimage to the country where she spent her late childhood and teenage years living on Mongrel Downs cattle station in the Tanami Desert. This journey became the subject of her award-winning memoir, Craft for a Dry Lake (2001). This journey set in motion a renewed relationship with the place that has seen her return to the Tanami annually for more than twenty years. The relationships that developed during this period resulted in Mahood’s longstanding preoccupation with maps and mapmaking developing into collaborative mapping projects with Walmajarri and Jaru peoples, the contours of which she traces in her second book Position Doubtful: Mapping landscapes and memories (2016).' (Introduction) 

'Deborah Bird Rose (1946–2018) was an interdisciplinary thinker who helped establish the field of the environmental humanities (or ecological humanities); in 2012 she also co-founded the scholarly journal Environmental Humanities. Having initially trained in anthropology, Rose strove to push that field and other ethnographic studies beyond their stubborn anthropocentrism. She came to Australia in 1980 from Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania, to undertake PhD research in Aboriginal Australia. Her thinking was shaped by the decades she spent with Aboriginal mentors and friends, in the Northern Territory communities of Lingara and Yarralin. Across her writing, in books such as Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and extinction (2011) and Nourishing Terrains: Australian Aboriginal views of landscape and wilderness (1996), Rose demonstrated and promoted attentiveness to, and ethical engagement with, the plethora of beings on Earth.' (Introduction) 

'Theatre director John Clark’s close namesake John Clarke, in character as that infamous Kiwi schlep Fred Dagg, once averred that autobiography

is a highly recommended form of leisure activity, as it takes up large chunks of time and if you’re a slow writer or you think particularly highly of yourself, you can probably whistle away a year or two … It’s not a difficult business and remember this is also your big opportunity to explain what a wonderful person you are and how you’ve been consistently misunderstood … 

 (Introduction)