Cirrus@Austlit

(Publication abstract)

'While authors of the late 19th century may have been concerned with the production of a masculinist boy, the borrowing patterns of a group of children at a Sunday-school library in Australia show a far more fluid approach to reading and to gender. The children of the emerging Presbyterian middle class at Kurrajong Heights approached their library with imagination and originality. Girls were interested in the practicalities of work and engineering, while boys inhabited more imaginary worlds. There were staggered and overlapping ideas of what it was to be male or female. Borrowing records introduce the complex and confused world of lower middle-class female authors and their influence in making boys and girls.' (Publication abstract)

'This article analyses two works of contemporary Australian fiction—Wayne Macauley’s Caravan Story and Julie Koh’s “Inquiry Regarding the Recent Goings-On in the Woods”—and places their depictions of artists under attack in the context of Australian cultural policy history. Despite the surreal hyperviolence contained in these stories, their concerns neatly align with the academic criticisms of cultural policy in their respective eras. Caravan Story, published at the end of the John Howard era, shows how a focus on economic return in lieu of artistic merit can erode the value artists place on themselves and their work. “Inquiry”, published soon after Minister for the Arts George Brandis had significantly reduced available arts funding, represents the drastic effect the funding cuts had on artists and the passionate community response. The texts are further connected by their optimistic endings, contextualised here through an exploration of the artists’ biographies and their struggles to push back against cultural demands of economic success. This article shows how these experimental works of fiction make the case for the intrinsic value of the arts through narratives that reject the economic imperative and in their very constitution as creative works.'(Publication abstract)

'Australia’s political historians have emphasised the forgettability of John Christian Watson, the leader of the world’s first national Labor government. In their recently republished A Little History of the Australian Labor Party (2024), Nick Dyrenfurth and Frank Bongiorno note that Labor’s early leaders are “ancient history” (10) to most pundits compared with more recent titans, the Hawkes and Keatings, who loom so large in the party’s self-narratives. Ross McMullin, another of the party’s leading historians, says in So Monstrous a Travesty (2004) that after four months of unstable minority government, the Watson administration “disappeared into historical obscurity” (134).' (Introduction)

'A note of defiance draws these two new editions on refugee theatre together: both are reaffirmations of the significance of theatre, stage and performance in the politics and aesthetics of protest and refugee resistance now. This collection of plays is the second Staging Asylum anthology. The first was published by Currency Press and edited by Emma Cox in 2013, and it presented a collection of six plays from refugee-related theatre in response to the Howard-era Pacific Solution. This return to staging asylum includes a history of the significance of the stage in the resistance to Operation Sovereign Borders. It is, the editors argue, both terrible and incredible that another anthology is needed. Staging Asylum, Again presents a theatrically adventurous and formally diverse second generation of plays and their new genres: a “decolonial” theatre that places the experiences of asylum seekers and refugees alongside those of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, and theatre made by, with and about children.' (Introduction)