Cirrus@Austlit

'The chapter outlines the mid-twentieth century debate over an Athenian-Boeotian divide in Australian literature, which extended an earlier false dichotomy between city and the bush through distinguishing between the expatriate and the writer who stays at home. Despite a global dispersion of Australian writers, it argues that most scholarship has tended to focus on those in Britain. The chapter discerns that the racialisation underscoring who is generally considered ‘expatriate’ renders the term problematic and that many Australian diasporic poets define themselves through other means. It also finds that many experience feelings of shame, anger, and guilt over the colonial violence shaping Australia. The chapter considers the development of Lola Ridge’s poetics while in Australia before considering Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s poem “Yussef (Hi-Jack),” written during a hijacking of her plane by Palestinian militants, and the poetry Oodgeroo wrote in China. The chapter foregrounds the significance of First Nations mobility, engaging with the London writing of Aboriginal activist A. M. Fernando in the 1920s and writing of recent poets like Ellen Van Neerven.'

Source: Abstract

'There is a place in Sydney called Inscription Point, where, at the busy juncture of flight paths and container shipping traffic, a brass tablet is set into a sandstone cliff. Thereabouts Captain Cook once cut the date – 1770 – and his ship’s name – HMS Endeavour – into a tree, and so in 1822 members of the loftily-named but very short-lived Philosophical Society of Australasia had the tablet installed to mark the spot. Today the tablet’s corroded words are virtually illegible, but its brisk edges stand out from the pocked and lunging sandstone rockface – a green square, a small abstraction in the landscape. ‘Here fix the tablet. This must be the place’ reads the more lasting memorial, a sonnet by the colonial poet and judge Barron Field. It would be reasonable to think that the unveiling of the tablet is what inspired Field’s poem – that would be the normal order of things. But Field wasn’t so incidental to the scene. The tablet was his pet project: he had commandeered the Philosophical Society to this end. So, Field created the occasion for his own poem, which is as much about Cook’s inscription (‘But where’s the tree with the ship’s wood-carv’d fame?’) as about the perpetuity of his tablet.' (Introduction)  

'This chapter explores “constellational form” in Gerald Murnane. It argues that the key continuity in Murnane’s work lies in his associative way of writing, and analyzes the motivations and philosophical convictions underlying this form. It traces these formal continuities across Murnanes work, from his early novel Tamarisk Row (1974) through to his post-hiatus fictions up to Border Districts (2017). It also considers Murnanes “idealism” and probes how this underpins his unique understanding of the ontology of characterological beings and the relationship between implied author and reader.' (Publication abstract)

'In the middle of a Sydney winter at the turn of the century, Alain Badiou scrawled a message in a copy of Being and Event (1988): ‘For Melissa, in friendship, and in memory of a very dense and very happy trip to Sydney’. The book didn’t exist yet in English; its author was virtually unknown outside of France. At the time—in the late 1990s—only a handful of Badiou’s works were available in English, the most notable being a critical commentary on Gilles Deleuze translated by the Australian philosopher Louise Burchill. So, what had brought Badiou to Sydney? Most immediately, it was Oliver Feltham. Feltham was a young Australian philosopher who had come back from Paris with a plan to bring Badiou to Australia. He contacted the Sydney-based philosopher Melissa McMahon, who helped arrange for Badiou to speak at the 1999 Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy’s ‘To Be Done with Judgement’ conference. There Badiou delivered a paper on ‘The Part and the Whole’ and, on the conference’s final night, launched the English translation of Manifesto for Philosophy (1991). The launch, at Gleebooks, was poorly attended: a few diffident graduate students and academics milled about the bookshelves. A photograph from the event shows Badiou towering (he is very tall) and affectless, arms crossed, besides John Bacon, a logician from Sydney.' (Introduction)

i just want plumbing, art

Gareth Morgan, ‘the national debt’.

I hate work so / That I have found a way

Lesbia Harford, ‘I hate work so’.

'Lionel Fogarty occupies a curious place in Australia letters. Widely regarded as the most important Aboriginal poet of his generation and even, as John Kinsella declares, ‘the greatest living Australian poet’, he has nevertheless received relatively little attention from scholars and is published by small, independent presses. Where considered at all, his politically charged, singular poetry is often treated with baffled awe or else conceived as a method of resisting the coloniser through an idiosyncratically ‘creolised’ English. This paper returns to various critical attempts to think Fogarty’s poetry, from ‘deep reading’ to ‘re-reading’ – some of which, like the trope of ‘unsettlement’, have yielded influential hermeneutics for the reading of Australian poetry per se – and treats these past readings as an entry point for an analysis of the complex rhetorical and poetic games of address in Fogarty’s poetics. It considers, in turn, the poetic importance of Fogarty’s sustained commitment to internationalist, liberationist, and anti-colonial politics, which it conceives as a poetics of solidarity.' (Publication abstract)