'Ruth Joiner's short life has not run smoothly: opportunities have fallen through the cracks at every turn. The exception is creating her daughter, Dewi, and when we meet these two at the end of Ruth's life it is Ruth's calm demeanour and care that makes us confident that Dewi's future will be happier and carry more opportunity and joy. Orphaned in Bali and raised by her adoptive parents in the Australian desert, as a young woman Ruth escaped to the small town of Lost River. Her life has been marked by hardship, heartbreak, and loss, and defined by racism, illness, and her relationships with an enigmatic man named David and her young daughter Dewi. Yet against all odds, she ultimately finds peace with her family, her past, and herself. Set in Western Australia, Lost River: Four Albums is a novella of dislocation and loss, and continues Simone Lazaroo's interest in connections between Australian and South-East Asian lives.' (Publication abstract)
'This article examines how the concept of the archive may operate as a generative rather than purely repressive space for a young Eurasian woman, Ruth, who is dying of breast cancer in Simone Lazaroo’s novel, Lost River: Four Albums. I build on the concept of hypomnesis which first appeared in Plato’s Phaedrus to distinguish between the oral and written forms of remembering, but has come to signify the wider act of turning memory into something concrete, a product emerging from the process of remembering and memorialising. The preamble announces the marginalised Eurasian woman’s decision to use four discarded photograph albums as ‘Somewhere to store all those memories’ for her child, Dewi, to have after the mother’s passing. The narrative then follows a nonlinear structure where each of the four albums investigates the origins and meaning of Dewi’s life from her conception until her mother’s final moments. I argue that this act of domiciling lives in these albums operates as a form of counter history, comprising moments that tell an alternative story about belonging for the disenfranchised. That is, operating from the bottom, as a mother intimately familiar with the precarity of home, Ruth designs her archive to demonstrate how dwelling, if you get it ‘right,’ may lead to a sense of binding love, happiness, and home. To conclude, the essay explores how Derrida’s ideas about ‘archival desire’ help to illustrate the kind of ‘taking care’ Heidegger privileges in his writing on dwelling.' (Publication abstract)
The Mabo Turn in Australian Fiction
Oxford
:
Peter Lang
,
2017
13852561
2017
multi chapter work
criticism
'This is the first in-depth, broad-based study of the impact of the Australian High Court’s landmark Mabo decision of 1992 on Australian fiction. More than any other event in Australia’s legal, political and cultural history, the Mabo judgement – which recognised indigenous Australians’ customary native title to land – challenged previous ways of thinking about land and space, settlement and belonging, race and relationships, and nation and history, both historically and contemporaneously. While Mabo’s impact on history, law, politics and film has been the focus of scholarly attention, the study of its influence on literature has been sporadic and largely limited to examinations of non-Aboriginal novels.
'Now, a quarter of a century after Mabo, this book takes a closer look at nineteen contemporary novels – including works by David Malouf, Alex Miller, Kate Grenville, Thea Astley, Tim Winton, Michelle de Kretser, Richard Flanagan, Alexis Wright and Kim Scott – in order to define and describe Australia’s literary imaginary as it reflects and articulates post-Mabo discourse today. Indeed, literature’s substantial engagement with Mabo’s cultural legacy – the acknowledgement of indigenous people’s presence in the land, in history, and in public affairs, as opposed to their absence – demands a re-writing of literary history to account for a “Mabo turn” in Australian fiction. ' (Publication summary)
The Mabo Turn in Australian Fiction
Oxford
:
Peter Lang
,
2017
13852561
2017
multi chapter work
criticism
'This is the first in-depth, broad-based study of the impact of the Australian High Court’s landmark Mabo decision of 1992 on Australian fiction. More than any other event in Australia’s legal, political and cultural history, the Mabo judgement – which recognised indigenous Australians’ customary native title to land – challenged previous ways of thinking about land and space, settlement and belonging, race and relationships, and nation and history, both historically and contemporaneously. While Mabo’s impact on history, law, politics and film has been the focus of scholarly attention, the study of its influence on literature has been sporadic and largely limited to examinations of non-Aboriginal novels.
'Now, a quarter of a century after Mabo, this book takes a closer look at nineteen contemporary novels – including works by David Malouf, Alex Miller, Kate Grenville, Thea Astley, Tim Winton, Michelle de Kretser, Richard Flanagan, Alexis Wright and Kim Scott – in order to define and describe Australia’s literary imaginary as it reflects and articulates post-Mabo discourse today. Indeed, literature’s substantial engagement with Mabo’s cultural legacy – the acknowledgement of indigenous people’s presence in the land, in history, and in public affairs, as opposed to their absence – demands a re-writing of literary history to account for a “Mabo turn” in Australian fiction. ' (Publication summary)
'This article examines how the concept of the archive may operate as a generative rather than purely repressive space for a young Eurasian woman, Ruth, who is dying of breast cancer in Simone Lazaroo’s novel, Lost River: Four Albums. I build on the concept of hypomnesis which first appeared in Plato’s Phaedrus to distinguish between the oral and written forms of remembering, but has come to signify the wider act of turning memory into something concrete, a product emerging from the process of remembering and memorialising. The preamble announces the marginalised Eurasian woman’s decision to use four discarded photograph albums as ‘Somewhere to store all those memories’ for her child, Dewi, to have after the mother’s passing. The narrative then follows a nonlinear structure where each of the four albums investigates the origins and meaning of Dewi’s life from her conception until her mother’s final moments. I argue that this act of domiciling lives in these albums operates as a form of counter history, comprising moments that tell an alternative story about belonging for the disenfranchised. That is, operating from the bottom, as a mother intimately familiar with the precarity of home, Ruth designs her archive to demonstrate how dwelling, if you get it ‘right,’ may lead to a sense of binding love, happiness, and home. To conclude, the essay explores how Derrida’s ideas about ‘archival desire’ help to illustrate the kind of ‘taking care’ Heidegger privileges in his writing on dwelling.' (Publication abstract)
