Cirrus@Austlit

'This thesis investigates the function of humour in the survival of the Aboriginal people against all odds, including the onslaught of invasion, dispossession, powerlessness and oppression since the British invasion in 1788. ' (Source: Abstract)

'The “generation of 68” is a contested label applied to a loose group of Australian poets who began writing and publishing in the late 1960s. The thesis questions how this loose group of Australian poets can be understood as a generation, and uses network theory to map connections between generation of 68 poets. The application of network theory to literary studies presents a method for addressing as individuals poets who are also aligned with a generation. Central to the thesis is John Tranter’s The New Australian Poetry (1979) anthology, which attempts a definition of the generation of 68, and includes twenty-four poets Tranter identifies as belonging to the generation of 68. These poets include Robert Adamson, Charles Buckmaster, Michael Dransfield, and John Forbes.

'The generation of 68 poets presents unique difficulties to the researcher and critic due to the imprecise nature of literary generations. One of the main guiding questions for this thesis has been how to critically approach a group like the generation of 68 when the label, and the generation itself, is still so contested. Critical approaches to the generation of 68 often overlook the importance of the group dynamics on the poets and the poetry.

'Network theory offers a way to examine the dynamics of the group and the impact these relationships have not only on the formation of the generation, but also on the poets’ writing and publishing. By tracing the network connections, this thesis shows that the poets in The New Australian Poetry are part of overlapping poetry communities. What also becomes clear is that the label, generation of 68, is useful as a way to begin thinking about a large number of poets publishing during this period, and that the application of a decentralised understanding of network connections and vectors of sociability offer a new reading of this group of Australian poets.

'The thesis presents a taxonomy of little poetry magazines, to which generation of 68 poets contributed from 1968 to 1979, as a way of reading connections in the network. It also examines textual representations of sociability through generation of 68 poets’ use of names in poetry, with a specific focus on elegies written for deceased generation of 68 poets. The thesis considers the ongoing nature of these dialogues and the continuing connections between these poets. Significantly, it offers a new approach to the generation of 68 as a literary generation and provides a two-step approach for using network theory to examine a generation.' (Author's abstract)

My project explores the work of four contemporary Australian poets who have had relatively little critical attention: Judith Beveridge, Kevin Hart, Robert Gray and Michael Heald. In the work of all of these writers, the relationship between poetry and experience is a crucial and generative theme. The bearing of each poet’s individual spiritual beliefs and practices on their poetry is a major part of this investigation: if poetry is a matter of experience, the root of the word experience, “trial”, suggests that it offers situations for the transformation of the self. This is a quest that motivates their commitment to spirituality and meditative techniques as well as to writing, and in analysing such situations, the most intense of their kind in Australian poetry, I hope to reach a deeper understanding of these important poets than has yet been achieved.

'Drawing on the relationships between the testimony of mysticism, the Buddha’s teaching as recorded in the Pali Canon, and aspects of phenomenology and pragmatism, this study addresses the spiritual qualities of awareness, equanimity and ethics in contemporary Australian poetry with a particular focus on their non-sectarian nature. The poets of this study are Buddhist, Catholic or committed to Vipassana meditation, yet they share similar concerns about experience and the reading, writing and consequence of poetry, and the status of experience within the spiritual traditions they are affiliated with. More subtly, the importance of experience is implied within their poetics: the subjects, the structures and imagery within their poems and, particularly, their attitudes to metaphor. Ultimately, this study’s questioning of the experience of poetry addresses the meetings of knowledge, meaning and being, and the nature of the self within which they meet.' (Thesis abstract)

'Compares the contemporary urban position within the family of Indonesian and Indigenous Australian women, as represented in the literary texts the women themselves produce. ‘State Ibuism’ for Indonesian women is contrasted with the image of Indigenous Australian women as ‘battlers’ and ‘matriarchs’ in the construction of culturally and socially appropriate female behaviour. Chapter 4 discusses a number of texts by Aboriginal women writers, particularly Sally Morgan’s My Place and Ruby Langford Ginibi’s Don’t Take Your Love to Town.' (Publication abstract)