Cirrus@Austlit

'This special issue of New Scholar originates from a 2013 conference of the same name held at Macquarie University, convened by the Macquarie University English Department. The conference explicitly sought to examine trends, manifestations and solidifications in Australian writing and modes of analysis which might reveal both new research frontiers and new scholars pursuing twenty-first century approaches to movement, temporality, spatiality, canonicity and

the cross-cultural transference of values and identities. As the conference progressed, the focus on signposting or predicting future Australian literary trends and representations began to be superseded by the contested spaces of ‘the road,’ particularly as a space of contested readings and contests between ways of reading. The word ‘road’ itself etymologically invites this, and the Call for Papers included a reminder of its Old English root rād, with its parallel meanings ‘expedition,’ ‘raid’ and later an ‘open way between two places’ as conducive to postcolonial and transnational considerations. The road has often meant a vital, torrid testing ground for Australian self-definition and annihilation, and as guest editors we were particularly impressed with how the essays to follow took this trope in fiercely independent directions. ' (Author's introduction)

'The sacred, as understood in the Christian religion and as reflected in work by poets of that persuasion, is manifested as a ‘presence’ which transcends our reality and which surpasses language. That this sacred presence can be conveyed and experienced through poetry relies on two assumptions: firstly, of God's real presence or ‘absent presence,’ and secondly, that the aesthetic is a means by which God's presence can be experienced.

The poetry of Les Murray reflects his exploration of the sacred within his Christian (more specifically Roman Catholic) tradition. In this task, metaphor is both the means by which he articulates the sacred, its elusive presence and absence, and the pathway that can lead the reader to encountering it. This navigation is a journey in which the poet must pass beyond and around the obstacles of language: the inherited established metaphors that bind the poet and his work to reality, handicapping the sacred experience; and language itself that weighs on us all, leading us to use words that are never quite our own, confining us to already-established and thus assumed ways of speaking and seeing the world. ' (Publication abstract)

'While Frederick Turner's envisioning of the frontier remains pervasive in representations of Australian postcolonial geographies and constructions of national identity, recent anthropological evidence suggests more nuanced 'lifeworlds' may better approximate the lived experience of 'frontier' towns such as Alice Springs, in Central Australia.

'This paper reimagines Baudelaire's flâneur to examine two walking narratives from the region. The analysis reveals at least two levels of produced space prevailing in Alice Springs, with many other imagined spaces imbricated in a more complex political geography than Turner's frontier might explain. The paper aims to alert writers and journalists to recent shifts in anthropology, leading hopefully to more nuanced representations of Australian postcolonial geographies.

'The first text is a Central Australian Aboriginal Dreaming narrative called 'A Man from the Dreamtime,' a traditional Kaytetye story. Kaytetye elder Tommy Kngwarraye Thompson told the story to anthropologist Myfany Turpin as part of a collection published as Growing Up Kaytetye (2003). The second is one (walking) chapter from a recent narrative of political geography and memoir by Eleanor Hogan entitled Alice Springs (2012).' (Publication summary)

'R. G. (Guy) Howarth (1906-74) was a poet, scholar, teacher and advocate for Australian literature. He was foundation editor of Southerly from 1939 to 1956. From 1955 to 1971 he was Arderne Professor of English Literature in the University of Cape Town, a position he accepted after he was passed over for the prestigious Challis Chair at Sydney University in a disappointment that stayed with him to his premature end.

'In Cape Town Howarth continued his research on English and Australian literature, and began to teach South African writing. In 'Sisters of the South' (1958) he made a case for comparing Australian, New Zealand and South African literature. He introduced a course called Imaginative Writing which J.M. Coetzee took as a student. In Youth (2002), Coetzee's protagonist remembers: 'Howarth, who is an Australian, seems to have taken a liking to him, he cannot see why.' Howarth introduced Coetzee and other UCT students to Australian writers. He encouraged Coetzee to approach Prof Joseph Jones at the University of Texas at Austin about graduate study. Today Coetzee's archive sits with both Howarth's and Jones's in the Harry Ransom Center at UTA.

'Jones saw in Howarth the avatar of 'a new-type literary historian' who would be polymathically able to approach 'all literature in English-as a reticulated if not yet wholly integrated world-phenomenon'. For Coetzee, Howarth is an example of a teacher who 'may not have much of inherent significance to convey' yet can still 'exert a shaping influence on his students'. This long legacy re-opens the question of what happened in Sydney in 1951 where a road blocked for Howarth became a road ahead elsewhere.' (Publication abstract)