Cirrus@Austlit

'In this episode, a conversation with Winnie Dunn – a Tongan-Australian writer, editor, the General Manager of Sweatshop Literacy Movement, and now author of the novel Dirt Poor Islanders.

'Dunn’s book is a potent, mesmerising novel that opens our eyes to the brutal fractures navigated when growing up between two cultures and the importance of understanding all the many pieces of yourself.

'Winnie Dunn was joined in conversation at Readings Carlton by Evelyn Araluen, poet and literary editor. Araluen’s first book, Dropbear, won the 2022 Stella Prize.'  (Introduction)

'In recent years, the study of Aboriginal literatures has moved from a marginal interest of Australian literature to a site of global inquiry. Due to limited Aboriginal representation in the formal institutions of literary studies, this shift has arguably not coincided with sufficient reciprocal interpretive mechanisms capable of situating the Aboriginal text in a dynamic relationship with Aboriginal culture. As such, many of these discourses have reconstituted culturally inappropriate anthropological mechanisms in their engagements with contemporary Aboriginal literatures (Araluen, ‘Shame’). The unstable entanglements of power, sovereignty and exclusion that frame the Australian conditions of settler coloniality are manifest in the institutions and disciplines that teach, publish, and interpret Aboriginal literature. In the space of Indigenous research discourse and practice, Ngati Awa and Ngati Porou academic Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s pioneering work on decolonial Indigenous methods and practices, Decolonising Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (1999), demonstrates that the concept of the discipline is not only an organising system of knowledge but also a system of organising people and bodies. She argues that the intellectual productions of nineteenth-century imperialism, including notions of civilisation and the Other, are bound to and assert geographic and economic forces of appropriation, expropriation and incorporation (69). These knowledges not only form academic disciplines but have also been used to discipline the colonised through exclusion, marginalisation and denial.'  (Publication abstract)

'This chapter contests the prevailing interpretation of the post-Mabo turn as a decisive new era in Australian cultural history. While the Mabo High Court decision of 1992 was an important milestone in struggles for Indigenous land rights, the insistence on this date as a literary periodization neglects the continuities in settler culture that still structure settler fiction in Australia. Alternatively, recent First Nations fiction suggests possibilities within and outside dominant paradigms of legality.' (Publication abstract)

'I write in honour and respect for the 700+ First Nations language groups of so-called-Australia, for the ancestors who have cared for this land since time immemorial, and for the custodians who continue to protect the sovereignty of their lands and waters. I write in honour and respect for my ancestors, family and countrypeople.'  (Introduction)

'I told you this was a thirst so great it could carve rivers.

'This fierce debut from award-winning writer Evelyn Araluen confronts the tropes and iconography of an unreconciled nation with biting satire and lyrical fury. Dropbear interrogates the complexities of colonial and personal history with an alternately playful, tender and mournful intertextual voice, deftly navigating the responsibilities that gather from sovereign country, the spectres of memory and the debris of settler-coloniality. This innovative mix of poetry and essay offers an eloquent witness to the entangled present, an uncompromising provocation of history, and an embattled but redemptive hope for a decolonial future.' (Publication summary)

'Health, wellness, well-being, words which resonate with the most basic social questions of how we are toward one another. This year our answers have been drastically rearranged – we care for one another with distance, and forego almost all the habits of flourishing or eudaimonia. Not that it’s ever been simple: our essayists for Overland 239 approach these problems from a wide variety of intersecting experiences and disciplines.' (Publication summary)