Cirrus@Austlit

'The vibrant state of Aboriginal intellectual life is immediately evident upon reading Melissa Lucashenko’s foreword and Daniel Browning’s introduction to his Close to the Subject: Selected works. Lucashenko combines insight with an engaging, colloquial style; Browning, without apology or artifice, weighs up the successes, failures, and resentments of almost three decades as a journalist.' (Introduction)

'The remarkable second act of Jimmy Little’s career commenced with the release of Messenger in 1999. The album was a selection of atmospheric renditions of classic Australian rock songs. In stark contrast to the reassuring homeliness of his earlier recordings, Little’s reading of them evoked an Australia of vast empty spaces, melancholy, and solitude. Those lucky enough to attend the concerts that followed were struck by his goodwill and by the assured mastery of his performance and the fineness of his voice, which hadn’t deteriorated with age.' (Introduction)

'If nothing else, Lionel Fogarty’s longevity as a poet should bring him to our attention. Kargun, his first work, was published forty-two years ago amid the ferment of utopian Black Panther politics, discriminatory legislation, and racialised police violence. Fogarty’s finest work, Ngutji, published in 1984, drew on his experience growing up in Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement, but the breadth of his poetic vision was already evident. Some of the early poems such as ‘Jephson Street Brothers Who Had None’ and ‘Remember Something Like This’ originate in Fogarty’s experience of Cherbourg Aboriginal Mission and radical politics, but the poems’ truths are non-propositional and essentially human.' (Introduction)

'This original collection of essays by emerging and established Aboriginal and Settler scholars provides interpretative and theoretical perspectives on Kim Scott’s work. Twelve essays deal with all of Scott’s novels to date, along with his collaborative non-fiction and his work in the Wirlomin Noongar Stories and Language Project. The collection as a whole amounts to a case for Kim Scott as Australia’s most representative novelist today. 

Over a quarter of a century he has explored and unravelled the intertwined destinies of Aboriginal and Settler from the moment of invasion, contact and occupancy to the contradictory aspirations and government policies of today. In carrying out this project Scott consistently engages with the history and discourses that shape the national imaginary. Paradoxically it is this focus on the national that establishes Kim Scott as an international writer of stature.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Steeped in story-telling and endlessly curious, Reading the Country: An Introduction to Nomadology (1984) was the product of Paddy Roe, Stephen Muecke and Krim Benterrak, experimenting with what it might be like to think together about country. In the process a senior traditional owner, a cultural theorist and a painter produced a text unlike any other. Reading the Country: 30 Years On is a celebration of one of the great twentieth-century books of intercultural dialogue. Recalling a spirit of intellectual risk and respect, in this collection, Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars, poets, writers and publishers both acknowledge the past and look, with hope, to future transformations of culture and country.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'NEW: Emerging Scholars in Australian Indigenous Studies was initiated by Philip Morrissey from the University of Melbourne and Heidi Norman from the University of Technology Sydney in 2015. The journal provides a platform for publishing undergraduate scholarship in Indigenous studies and attracts high quality student work.' (Publication summary)

'The invitation to submit an essay as part of this collection on ego-histoire has enabled me to reflect on a series of intra-Aboriginal narratives between different peoples along the Tweed River that I had been exposed to in my early childhood. Over the passage of time, I have begun to understand how these narratives (and vivid fragments of story) have formed my basic dispositions, in a manner analogous to the Bourdieuan concept of habitus. Bourdieu sees habitus as ‘a system of lasting, transposable dispositions which, integrating past experiences, functions at every moment as a matrix of perceptions, appreciations, and actions’ (Bourdieu 1990, pp. 82–83). The dialogic, quasi-magical world represented in these stories has intrinsically shaped my historical-consciousness and underscored my subsequent work in the academe, both in bringing Aboriginal epistemologies to the fore of pedagogy in Aboriginal studies at the University of Melbourne, for example, and in exploring notions of the uncanny in Aesopic philosophy (Morrissey 2011).' (Introduction)