Cirrus@Austlit

'Australian Women’s Historical Photography: Other Times, Other Views examines the works of six women photographers against the historical backdrop of settler violence towards Indigenous Australians, the First Women’s Movement, the Great War of 1914-1918, Australia’s imperial occupation of New Guinea, the rise of anti-Western sentiment in China and debates about photography’s status as an art form.

'Women’s works from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have been down-played or even ignored in existing accounts of Australia’s cultural history, and this study is aimed at rectifying this situation. At the same time, the book demonstrates why amateur works are just as important as commercial works to our understanding of the past.' (Publication summary)

'It’s a classic. It feels good. I’m talking about a poem. And I’m talking about a t-shirt. What’s a t-shirt? A t-shirt is something an Australian poet on an international tour with three others might wear. A t-shirt is something an Australian poet on tour with three others might wear and wash, or refuse to wash; might refuse to stop wearing. I’m talking about π.O.’s tour t-shirt. I’m talking about π.O.’s dirty t-shirt tour, which materialises here, four decades later, as the chronicle-in-verse called The Tour.'  (Introduction)  

'HOW PREDICTABLE THAT it has taken me such a long time to begin. How brutally predictable. Months after formulating a title, I reluctantly shared it with some fellow travellers by Wangi Falls, in the Northern Territory, when they wondered what name I had for my work. Even then, sitting in the tropical shade after swimming in those sacred falls, I knew I was in trouble. What a lovely title, they said. I agreed then as I agree now. It sounds lovely still when I say it aloud: The Beginning of the Poem. Everybody loves beginnings. And even if everybody doesn’t love poems, people generally seem to love the idea of them, an idea practically and theoretically intact at the poem’s beginning. What a grand and ambitious intention my title seems to express, what discursive evocations it seems to promise. And yet, on that day at Wangi Falls, I had known for months already that it was painful and often impossible to get started on this beginning. How could my work live up to its title? Although disappointing to me, it is perhaps fittingly bathetic that I should struggle to summon the will, and the skill, required to begin a work that is all about beginning.' (Introduction)

'The old hill near where I grew up was outwardly ruined: its pines were dead, its vines gone to seed and its sheds, which once held some purpose, sunk and rusted. With my immature logic I considered this place open and powerful, even though the land was enclosed by a wire fence and fallow from overcultivation and neglect. Like other places in the world, the traces of colonial settlement here held dull, sour feelings. The entire place seemed displaced from itself; maybe nothing could belong there.

'Writing these poems has something to do with being in lands like this. As a child that hill gave me my first feeling of personal privacy, even though it was open, even though it was fenced for someone else, and perhaps because the fence was there. The poems here express indignation at the eventual consequences of privacy. Yet, equally, privacy fascinates me. Equally, fences fascinate me – their lines, their tensions, their bending. I am not the first to say that poetry is a form of enclosure, but I want to say it here again, anyway. I love how permeable this form of enclosure can be. In the same way, I loved how the fence around that private hill would bend as I moved through it.

'–Lucy Van'

Source: Publisher's blurb.