Cirrus@Austlit

'In 1995 – just post Mabo, Noongar writer and scholar Aunty Rosemary Vandenberg delivered an excoriating address to the annual Association for the Studied of Australian Literature gathering (ASAL) gathering in Tandanya, Adelaide. The conference theme was ‘Rewriting the Mainstream’. Aunty Rosemary argued in an eloquent and passionate address that the mainstream/whitestream was in dire need of re-writing. Not before noting though, that there were no First Nations people of Tandanya invited to speak at the conference.' (Introduction) 

'In Luke Carman’s 2013 debut, An Elegant Young Man, the Kerouac-revering narrator from Western Sydney had his wayward literary influences corrected by a university education, and went running back to ‘beat, beat, beat’ on the doors of his old friends to apprise them of the fact ‘that Australia is not the place for ecstatic truth’. As the coy repetition suggests, the evangelistic about-turn was an ironic one: Carman had no interest in preserving the sanctity of an ‘Australian’ voice, dramatising instead the volatile swing of the cringe between reverent imitation and a parochial insistence on the local. That ‘the cringe’ was just the kind of ‘missile’ which a certain kind of ‘Australian Intellectual … delights to toss at the Australian mob’ was something A.A. Phillips foresaw when he coined the term. Charting the travails of his auto-fictive narrator as he ventured from Western Sydney into more cosmopolitan circles – the humiliating missteps and wild over-corrections, the paroxysms of devotion followed by renunciation – and implicating him, belatedly, in the relay of condescension, Carman put the lie to those of us who’d act as though we’d sprung, wise as Athena, from the side of Zeus’ head fully-formed. '  (Introduction)

'‘I have worked at Dusty’s since I was fifteen,’ says Kathy, the pally narrator of Katharine Pollock’s novel Her Fidelity. She’s 29 now, going nowhere slowly. Kathy’s workplace is a down-at-heel Brisbane record store and her workmates are dissatisfied, heavy-drinking men: frowning Jason, pretty Ian, pervy Warren, Silent Andy, and the store’s jaded owner and namesake, Dusty. Then there’s Mel, the other woman on staff, who commands the store’s office, sorting rosters and dispensing wisdom and snacks. Seventeen years older than Kathy, Mel is gay and unfazed by her male colleagues: the implication of her sexuality within the novel is that, among men, she has nothing to prove. Kathy, by contrast, is two parts exasperation to one part propitiation in the face of her male frenemies, as she calls them. Mel is cool. Kathy is uncool and she knows it.' (Introduction) 

'Am I a good mother or a bad mother? This question inflects my perception of each day, of my every action and every word as they steadily accumulate into the imago I hold of myself as a mother. Healthy snacks: good. Screen time: bad. Embraces: good. Snapping, shouting, screaming: bad bad bad.' (Introduction)