Cirrus@Austlit

'Biography is one of the most potent arts of democracy because it links the individual to the body politic and to history. It stands in parallel with independent long-form journalism. Whereas independent journalism is under threat, biography is currently one of the most popular and productive genres of publishing, breaking down the stratification of readership associated with almost every other category of writing. In the academy, the status of biography has transformed over the last few decades, with historians embracing the genre, literary studies scholars experimenting with form, and a wealth of new infrastructure embedding biographical inquiry in Australia. The biographical turn in Australia has brought the two disciplines of history and literary studies closer together and enriched their scholarship. David Marr’s Patrick White, Fiona Capp’s My Blood’s Country, Mark McKenna’s Return to Uluru and Alexis Wright’s Tracker are just some examples of the field over the last 30 years. This article considers the principles underpinning contemporary biography and its practice. It reflects on the particular challenges of writing about living subjects, negotiating intimacy and privacy, and the uses of empathic listening in biographical interviews. It also explores the value of collective biography as a genre of current significance.' (Publication abstract)

'In 2018, Behrouz Boochani’s testimonial memoir No Friend but the Mountains confronted Australian readers with their complicity in the nation’s carceral border-industrial complex. In the five years since its publication, it has been translated and sold into eighteen languages in twenty-three countries and adapted for film, theatre and a song cycle. This article uses a book-historical approach to present a short biography of No Friend, analysing how it has evolved as a noteworthy work that has taken on distinct lives in the nation and beyond. It analyses two significant moments of recognition in the biography of this book: the Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards, and the special issue of the life writing journal Biography. The life of this book—its production, reception and material form—suggests the potential for allegiances between cultural and literary elites in the reception of life narratives by forcibly displaced people. These allegiances mark the early versions of No Friend and have been central to its extensive mobility to new readerships.' (Publication abstract)

'Autobiographical graphic novels have become crucial texts for understanding displacement and transnational identities. This article discusses a long-lost early example of the genre, The Voyage and Adventures of a Well-Behaved German in Kangarooland (Reise-Abenteuer eines Braven Deutschen im Lande der Kangaroo), a series of proto-comic books created circa 1918–1919 by the cartoonist C. Friedrich. A German immigrant to Australia imprisoned in an Australian internment camp during World War I, Friedrich used his self-published comics to document the routines, passions and frustrations of camp life. Drawing on recent scholarship on “POW creativity” as a conceptual lens, we argue that the transnational displacement at the heart of Friedrich’s work affirms Kangarooland as a pioneering work that provides a conceptual link with later autobiographical graphic novels and which should lead scholars to question claims that autobiographical comics are an American-born genre. Its origins in displacement and transnationalism, themes that animate so many of the most renowned graphic novels of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, suggest the genre instead developed out of the ability of comics to depict transnationalism and the precarity of displacement.' (Publication abstract)

'This article focuses on memoirs by three Australian journalists, each of whom was born to European parents from a non-native-English-speaking background: Elisabeth Wynhausen’s Manly Girls (1989), Tom Dusevic’s Whole Wild World (2016) and James Jeffrey’s My Family and Other Animus (2018). I also discuss Jeffrey’s Paprika Paradise (2007), an earlier memoir of travelling in his mother’s homeland of Hungary with his northern English father. The article explores the extent to which these memoirs are examples of transcultural life writing, attuned to questions of language and culture. I argue that at least two of the texts are, while one is more equivocal on these questions. All three authors take care to translate their non-native-English-speaking family members’ cultural and political attitudes into an idiom that makes sense to a contemporary Anglophone Australian readership. At the same time, they often read familiar “Anglo” cultural norms critically, through a transcultural lens.' (Publication abstract)

'This article discusses two recent essays published by the memoirists Amani Haydar (The Mother Wound) and Lucia Crowley-Osborne (I Choose Elena; My Body Keeps Your Secrets) during 2020–2022. By conceptualising these essays as paratext, drawing on Gillian Whitlock’s consideration of the paratext as a critical apparatus in an ethics of reading memoir, this article argues that Haydar and Crowley-Osborne are amplifying a broader call for care from Australian authors who write about trauma, illness and disability in autobiographical genres. Negotiating with some of the formal, cultural and generic limits for memoir as social justice, these essays emphasise the cultural value of narrating life stories as well as potential personal and community benefits. In their essays, Haydar and Crowley-Osborne offer exegetical insights on process and craft, but they also draw attention to trauma memoirs’ afterlives: to the evolving impact of circulation, reception and promotion on autobiographical life writing and in the context of what Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson name the unstable “futurity” of this genre. In doing so, these writers make visible ongoing wellbeing and other challenges for the author of trauma memoir after the work is published.' (Publication abstract)

'Thomas H. Ford and Justin Clemens’s Barron Field in New South Wales: The Poetics of Terra Nullius offers an important intervention in the historiography of settler-colonial Australia. Ford and Clemens have produced a highly original account of the complex contribution to Australian law, politics and poetics made by this “largely unacknowledged” (5) and pun-inducing figure—“a man with a pun for a name” (55)—introduced here as one of Australia’s founding fathers, in myriad, mutually constitutive ways.' (Introduction)

'Encountering Donald Horne’s writings today makes for a different experience compared to reading his books fresh off the presses. Where his portrayal and his criticisms of mid-century Australian life seem to me, half a century after publication, apt and amusing, his contemporaneous readers had different responses. Upon reading the Lucky Country (1964), for example, former prime ministerial department head Allen Brown told Robert Menzies that Horne’s opinions on matters Brown knew about were simply “wrong and ill-informed”; a reviewer of the same book famously shrugged in the Canberra Times that it had all been said before and would be “forgotten by the end of the summer”.' (Introduction)