Cirrus@Austlit

'A compelling novel of three women and their dark secrets from the award-winning author of The Yellow House.

'Three women. Three secrets. One weekend.

'Alison is an actress who no longer acts, Patrick a musician past his prime. The eccentric couple live an isolated, debauched existence in an old manor house in Scotland, a few miles outside their village. That is, until Patrick's teenage daughter, Neve, flees Australia to spend a year abroad with her doting, if unreliable, father, and the stepmother she barely knows.

'On the weekend of Neve's eighteenth birthday, her father insists on a special feast to mark her coming of age. Despite Neve's objections, her mother Shannon arrives in Scotland to join the celebrations. What none of them know is that Shannon has arrived with a hidden agenda that has the potential to shatter the delicate façade of the loving, if dysfunctional, family.

'Feast is the story of three women connected beyond blood, and what happens when their darkest secrets are hauled into the light.' (Publication summary)

'This article uses architectural analogies to explore the complexities of planning and executing a practice-led PhD project in contemporary Australian writing. Many scholars and creative practitioners have conceived of the writing process as a form of building, scaffolding or construction. A PhD always involves some aspect of planning – but to what extent can the creative practice be planned for? What happens when the project outpaces the planning, or when a writer finds herself in unscaffolded space? This article examines practice-led research methodologies drawn from the experiences and insights of three creative practitioners who are also current and recently completed PhD candidates. Their perspectives reveal the multiplicity of approaches available in creative practice research and points to the opportunities to explore the complexities between structure, space and practice in discussions of the creative writing PhD.' (Publication abstract)

'The serial killer novel has enjoyed unabated popularity since Thomas Harris’s 1988 bestseller The Silence of the Lambs prompted a publishing boom in the genre that endures today. Harris, as well as the influx of novelists who have followed in his wake, have been criticised for their gratuitous sensationalism, and for the rigid conservatism of their narrative arcs, which feature a return to order after the anarchism and disorder of the serial killer – narratives which bear little resemblance to the reality of the abject violence of serial homicide and its traumatic aftermath. This article examines the case studies of Ali Land’s novel Good Me Bad Me, and Emily Maguire’s An Isolated Incident, and identifies the way in which both writers innovate within the genre by using the bystander narrator to subvert the tropes of the detective procedural and decentre the generic focus on the monstrous figure of the serial killer, focussing the novel instead on the aftermath of the crime and its victims. The article argues such interventions by contemporary novelists in the serial killer genre offer a profound innovation that complicates the familiar narrative arc of anarchic crime and resolution in favour of a more ambiguous and realistic view of serial crime.' (Publication abstract)

'April got out flour from the cupboard, cracked eggs into a bowl. She read the recipe, read it again, although she’d made the dish many times before. Each afternoon when she got home from work she made pasta from scratch, whole-baked fish, slow-cooked tagines with preserved lemon. April had known nothing about searing meat or the right way to chop an onion until well into adulthood. Her own mother hated cooking, and April and Pip had grown up on meat and three veg, Chinese takeaway on Friday nights. But now April found the incremental amassing of basic skills to be satisfying, like collecting tiny nuggets of gold.' (Introduction)

'Even before I knew anything about Granddad Les, Wally and me sometimes dared each other to see how close to the knackery we could get. It was way out in the bottom paddock, and Dad had banned us from going further than the dam. Wally said it was because the whole paddock was haunted. He said he could see ghosts wisping in the grass like sheets blown from the washing line. But even then I knew for sure that was a lie.

'Ten-year-old Cub lives with her parents, older brother Cassie, and twin brother Wally on a lonely property bordering an abandoned cattle farm and knackery. Their lives are shadowed by the infamous actions of her Granddad Les in his yellow weatherboard house, just over the fence.

'Although Les died twelve years ago, his notoriety has grown in Cub's lifetime and the local community have ostracised the whole family.

'When Cub's estranged aunt Helena and cousin Tilly move next door into the yellow house, the secrets the family want to keep buried begin to bubble to the surface. And having been kept in the dark about her grandfather's crimes, Cub is now forced to come to terms with her family's murky history.

'The Yellow House is a powerful novel about loyalty and betrayal; about the legacies of violence and the possibilities of redemption.' (Publication summary)

'Justin Kurzel’s 2011 film Snowtown opens with a shot of the flat, South Australian countryside from a moving car window. A pulse-like soundtrack scores the scene. After a moment a monotone voice-over begins: a character based on convicted serial killer James Vlassakis narrates a dream he had, which climaxes with the sparse description of a Chihuahua yapping out of a gash from a man’s neck that looks like a ‘big fucking mouth’. This chilling opening sets the tone for the rest of the film: a relentless, suffocating, deeply unsettling fictionalisation of the infamous ‘bodies in the barrels’ serial murders that took place in the northern suburbs of Adelaide between 1992 and 1999, and which culminated in the discovery of eight dismembered bodies submerged in drums of hydrochloric acid, concealed in a disused bank vault in Snowtown, a small town 145 kilometres north of Adelaide.' (Introduction)