Cirrus@Austlit

'The year 2017 marked the eighty-fifth anniversary of the death of Fergusson (Fergus) Wright Hume (1859–1932). Best known for his hugely successful debut novel The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), set in Australia’s Melbourne, Hume went on to write many more works of fiction in the form of novels and short stories. These efforts resulted in a vast array of titles but none that captured the public imagination on a large scale and they are, today, mere curiosities of literary history. The closest that Hume came to replicating the publishing glory of The Mystery of a Hansom Cab was with his Australian-based murder mystery Madame Midas (1888). This article briefly explores Madame Midas and, while noting the story’s modest successes as both a book and a stage play, offers feminist and nationalist-focused rationales for this work’s inability to generate the same levels of excitement that surrounded, and continue to surround, Hume’s first novel.' (Publication abstract) 

In this chapter 'Rachel Franks and Alistair Rolls investigate food and its role in two of Australian Upfield's Napoleon Bonaparte novels. In particular, they examine food as an important element of storytelling, as well as a signal of indigenous identity, gender relations, ethnicity and class lines. In addition, Franks and Rolls discuss the ways in which food brings literary reflexivity into focus.' (Introduction 10)

'The 21st annual conference of the AAWP invited writers and academics to respond to the idea that, as writers, we are engaging in a type of ‘authorised theft’. Over 100 delegates responded enthusiastically by presenting papers that straddled genres, disciplines, modes of expression, as well as languages and cultures. Panel topics included sociologies of writing, poetry and song, narrative and narrative modes, responses to pain and trauma, digital literature and the online space, memoir/biography and travel writing, identity and voice, oral storytelling and ways of knowing, as well as translation and cross-cultural encounters.'

Source: Introduction.

'Capital punishment was common practice in the early decades of colonial Australia: the malefactor swinging from the end of a hangman’s noose a well-known sight. Crimes of anti-social behaviour, food and forgery were of central concern to the early colonists, with the criminal act most likely to result in an executioner plying his craft being the stealing of food. The first person hanged in the new colony, for the theft of butter, peas and pork provisions, was young Thomas Barrett, executed one month and one day after the arrival of the First Fleet in New South Wales. Murder quickly followed crimes motivated by greed, hunger, and slovenliness, with punishment for such acts also quickly applied by administrators. Yet, the very brutal murder, in Sydney in August 1803, of Constable Joseph Luker – the first officer of the law to be slain in the pursuit of his duty in Australia – went largely unpunished due to a lack of evidence and a twist of fate. This paper discusses the death of Constable Luker and how his story was written, and offers a brief analysis of the non-death of those considered responsible for such a violent crime in the context of the colony’s punishment systems.'  (Publication abstract)

'Women have always been central to true crime stories: as victims, perpetrators, readers, and (increasingly) as tellers of these tales. Indeed, these tales, often dismissed as sensationalised violence, offer important opportunities to reflect on crime and crime control.

'Many true crime writers today – including numerous women, working in a once male-dominated market – have been biographers, coroners, detectives, historians, journalists, lawyers, and psychologists. These backgrounds bring a style of storytelling that educates us about, not just merely entertains us with, crime. Importantly, many privilege complex and nuanced storytelling over simplistic stereotypes of women as just 'bad' or just 'good'. (Introduction)