Cirrus@Austlit

'In Luke Carman’s 2013 debut, An Elegant Young Man, the Kerouac-revering narrator from Western Sydney had his wayward literary influences corrected by a university education, and went running back to ‘beat, beat, beat’ on the doors of his old friends to apprise them of the fact ‘that Australia is not the place for ecstatic truth’. As the coy repetition suggests, the evangelistic about-turn was an ironic one: Carman had no interest in preserving the sanctity of an ‘Australian’ voice, dramatising instead the volatile swing of the cringe between reverent imitation and a parochial insistence on the local. That ‘the cringe’ was just the kind of ‘missile’ which a certain kind of ‘Australian Intellectual … delights to toss at the Australian mob’ was something A.A. Phillips foresaw when he coined the term. Charting the travails of his auto-fictive narrator as he ventured from Western Sydney into more cosmopolitan circles – the humiliating missteps and wild over-corrections, the paroxysms of devotion followed by renunciation – and implicating him, belatedly, in the relay of condescension, Carman put the lie to those of us who’d act as though we’d sprung, wise as Athena, from the side of Zeus’ head fully-formed. '  (Introduction)

'Discussing the challenges of setting fiction in his adopted America, expatriate Peter Carey recalled a comment by one of his students: ‘when you change countries you lose your peripheral vision.’ Working up the nerve to take stock of the ‘democratic experiment’ in Parrott and Olivier in America (2009), Carey sensibly muffled any missteps in the picaresque blunderings of two fish-out-of-water nineteenth-century Europeans, a myopic nobleman and his roguish footman. Though it’s 2011 when 22-year old Melburnian Will lugs his backpack from the airport carousel, Emily Bitto’s second novel Wild Abandon adopts a similar strategy: figuring its millennial hipster as a quixotic adventurer, charting the (Introduction)distance between his American dream and obstinate reality for comic juxtaposition.' (Introduction)

'In Gail Jones’ debut novel Black Mirror (2002), young Australian biographer Anna travels to London to meet Victoria Morrell, who in the 1930s fled a Western Australian gold-mining town for Paris, where she became an artist at the fringes of the surrealist movement. Interviewing her flamboyant subject, Anna discovers that Morrell’s extravagance conceals a deep shame that her father, owner of the local Midas mine, was violently racist. His fondness for proudly comparing the depth of his mine to the inferior height of the Eiffel Tower makes her flight to Paris symbolic, more than the act of a provincial putting on airs. Positioning art as a repudiation of the corrupting colonial logic of plunder, Anna celebrates Morrell as a ‘Prospector of the Marvellous’.' (Introduction)

'The unnamed narrator of Madeleine Watts’ debut novel The Inland Sea (2020) is a recent literature graduate and aspiring writer. Living off the dwindling remains of her student allowance, she plans to get a job, start saving for an airplane ticket overseas. But first she heads to Glebe to buy the first of the novels she will read on the rocks at Gordons Bay over the ‘last hot summer’ of her final months adrift in Sydney.' (Introduction)

'Since colonisation, stories of lost white children have been a feature of Australian literature. Elspeth Tilley calls it the ‘white-vanishing’ trope, arguing that stories of lost children, compulsively retold, enable white Australians to assume a victim position. Obscuring a history of violent dispossession, the lost white child functions as a symbol of national innocence. The lost white girl, in her spotless lace and linen, is where innocence is doubled down on. While the search for the lost girl offers an opportunity to assert national character, the mystery of what happens to all those cupids and Botticelli angels, merging prettily into the landscape, into the nonspecific threat of ‘out there’, remains a compelling lacuna around which the community rallies.' (Introduction)