Cirrus@Austlit

'This article discusses the extent to which female poets in Australia were disadvantaged by the predominance of male anthologists from the 1940s until recently. Through their actions many male anthologists, whether they were conscious of their bias or not, discriminated against female poets, often believing firmly in their own judgements about ‘quality’. Virginia Woolf’s personification of the patriarchy as Professor von X is still found in this period in the pronouncements of male anthologists who confuse their judgement of quality with an absolute truth, rather than understanding it as a matter of personal preference. However, ground-breaking female anthologists such as Kate Jennings, Susan Hampton, Kate Llewellyn, Jennifer Strauss and Susan Lever were able to identify strong work by many female poets, suggesting that many male anthologists were unconsciously discounting the work of female poets or favouring the work of male poets because they were men. From 1975, the publication of a number of women-only anthologies, particularly those by mainstream publishers, brought attention to the many female poets and the different voices and subjects they brought to their poetry, and compelled future anthologists to at least consider the female poets published in them. There has been a demonstrable upswing in the percentage of female poets included in mainstream anthologies since the appearance of the early women-only anthologies.' (Publication abstract)

'In her new book, Anna Johnson investigates how the exchange of ideas from the late eighteenth century between the Antipodes and the British Empire were to have a profound influence on the global constitution of knowledges, enabled by the rise of popular print culture. Her premise is that the Australian colonies, and New South Wales and Tasmania in particular, opened up new metaphorical and literal sites for British social experimentation, notably about the human condition, Indigenous peoples, and the natural environments of the new southern world.'  (Publication summary)

'Greater Western Sydney is unceded Aboriginal land, Country reciprocally caring and cared for by Darug, Dharawal and Gundungurra Peoples over tens of thousands of years. The region is currently home for more than 2.5 million people, with significant further population increase anticipated, facilitated by administrative documents such as the Cumberland Plain Conservation Plan. This pervasive desire for ongoing sprawling development is supported by ‘antiecological’ thinking creating ‘productionist timescapes’. This desire conflicts with the fact that Greater Western Sydney is a diverse place that is cared for by and cares for many: a beautiful and diverse Country, described by Western sciences as Cumberland Plain woodland, a natural world home for myriad non-human beings. This article reads a variety of contemporary literary texts, considering their differing attitudes to and representation of Care for Country. It identifies a continuum of placemaking practices on unceded Land, from the proprietorial, through varying visions for intercultural futures, to those committed to #landback. A commitment to intercultural practices of Care for Country is discernible, creating more just and equitable futures in the present. This article traces Western Sydney literature’s thinking on the entanglement and intra-action of human and more-than-human worlds. It concludes by observing this intra-action in practice.' (Publication abstract) 

'In recent years, the study of Aboriginal literatures has moved from a marginal interest of Australian literature to a site of global inquiry. Due to limited Aboriginal representation in the formal institutions of literary studies, this shift has arguably not coincided with sufficient reciprocal interpretive mechanisms capable of situating the Aboriginal text in a dynamic relationship with Aboriginal culture. As such, many of these discourses have reconstituted culturally inappropriate anthropological mechanisms in their engagements with contemporary Aboriginal literatures (Araluen, ‘Shame’). The unstable entanglements of power, sovereignty and exclusion that frame the Australian conditions of settler coloniality are manifest in the institutions and disciplines that teach, publish, and interpret Aboriginal literature. In the space of Indigenous research discourse and practice, Ngati Awa and Ngati Porou academic Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s pioneering work on decolonial Indigenous methods and practices, Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999), demonstrates that the concept of the discipline is not only an organising system of knowledge but also a system of organising people and bodies. She argues that the intellectual productions of nineteenth-century imperialism, including notions of civilisation and the Other, are bound to and assert geographic and economic forces of appropriation, expropriation and incorporation (69). These knowledges not only form academic disciplines but have also been used to discipline the colonised through exclusion, marginalisation and denial.'  (Publication abstract)

'What might thinking with specific waters, and particular watery forms, bring to our understandings of how literature comes to mean? Taking cues from recent work in both the Blue Humanities – inspired by Pacific scholars – and the posthumanities, this article considers examples of recent writing in order to explore what is revealed when focus shifts to the aqueous. What ‘transversal alliances’ (Braidotti) and concomitant limitations are highlighted in writings and readings that take account of water? Thinking with a peculiarly Australian form of fluvial geomorphology – the chain of ponds – I consider four recent texts: John Kinsella’s 'Cellnight'; Natalie Harkin’s ‘Cultural Precinct’; Tony Birch’s The White Girl, and Christos Tsiolkas’s 7½. Thinking with the chain of ponds reveals aspects of ‘hydrocolonialisms’ (Hofmeyr) and immersive ontologies. While all waters are revealed to be operating within the multiple restrictions of the nation state together with anthropogenic climate emergency, a focus on waters reveals possibilities of renewal as well as human and more-than-human connections. Taking this beyond the island continent to trans-Pacific links, I also consider the ways such connections are joyfully celebrated in Lisa Reihana’s indigifuturist video work Groundloop.'  (Publication abstract)

'Let us take the bull by the horns:

[Gerald Murnane] is without question both the most original and most significant Australian author of the last fifty years, and the best writer Australia has produced since Christina Stead. (Stinson 104)

'One cannot help but ask what Murnane himself might make of this claim. On the one hand, he would surely find it flattering: who would not? To have one’s work hailed as even more significant than that of – to take but a few of the usual suspects – Alexis Wright, Patrick White, Helen Garner and David Malouf is no mean feat. And this is to exclude the poets from consideration, though Stinson’s terms (‘author’ and ‘writer’, in lieu of the narrower ‘novelist’) notably do not. What about another Wright – Judith? Or Oodgeroo Noonuccal? Les Murray? Lionel Fogarty? John Kinsella? To declare it is so with nary an instance of comparison makes this seem less a self-evidently defensible claim than a provocation intended to provoke spirited debate, especially given that little indication is offered as to what constitutes significance for Stinson. His approach in the preceding hundred pages is by turns introductory, contextual, and explicatory, offering a series of useful inroads that both academic and non-academic readers might follow to arrive at a better grasp of Murnane’s four post-break fictions, rather than evaluative, as this claim might otherwise lead readers to believe. The chief virtues of Murnane (2023) as a contribution to scholarship are its careful tracking of references across and beyond the titular author’s corpus, and its account of this obsessive grammarian’s oeuvre-spanning practice of literary revisionism, both of which build steadily upon the foundation laid by Imre Salusinszky’s Gerald Murnane (1993) and Anthony Uhlmann’s edited essay collection Gerald Murnane: Another World in This One (2020). This comparatively modest scholarly endeavour makes Stinson’s big bad bold claim all the more striking. Such an unusually explicit judgment of Murnane’s place in Australian literary history arrives at the eleventh hour, just a page or two before the critic’s voice cedes the soapbox entirely (well, almost) to that of this most auto-exegetical of writers, via the interview that permits Stinson’s subject the last word on his work. Footnotes, of course, excluded. Which takes us rather neatly back to the question with which we began.' (Introduction)