Cirrus@Austlit

'Graham Akhurst’s debut young adult novel Borderland is a tour de force. It is a coming-of-age story, set on the lands of the Turrbal, Yuggera and Gungarri people. We are introduced to Jonathan Lane, the first-person narrator, who has just graduated from St Lucia Private, an oppressive private secondary school where he had been a scholarship student. His time at St Lucia had not been an altogether happy experience for him. We are told that he ‘hated the attention he got for looking different and being poor in a school full of rich white kids’ (6). ' (Introduction)

'In an incisive review of Hazel Smith’s fifth book of poetry, ecliptical, Chris Arnold gestures to Smith’s reputation as a ‘relentlessly experimental’ poet. He notes the book title’s uncanny – because unintended but entirely logical – connection with Ern Malley’s iconoclastic The Darkening Ecliptic, to draw out some intriguing comparisons between these two books. Since her first volume, Abstractly Represented, Smith has been an innovator in Australia, in linguistic and generic experimentation. She has also been a pioneer in performance writing, intermedia work and electronic writing and her work has continued to break new ground over an impressive career spanning four decades. Nevertheless, Smith loses no time in problematising the descriptor ‘experimental’ in this interview. During our interview, Smith reflects on her commitment to expanding her own flamboyantly eclectic repertoire, discussing her interest in enigma, immersion, the alignment of the satirical and the surreal, the discomfort that humour in poetry often produces and computer-generated text. Smith had formerly been a professional musician and examines music’s formative impact on her poetry. She excavates her complex relationship with her Jewish heritage and talks frankly about the strictures of proscribed ethnic identities. Smith’s critical cosmopolitanism is evident in tropes of migration, displacement and transgenerational trauma, and in her attention, throughout these poems, to the precarity of many diasporic peoples.' (Introduction)

'Michelle Cahill’s debut novel Daisy & Woolf is accomplished and exhilarating. A re-reading of Virginia Woolf’s iconic modernist novel Mrs Dalloway, it excavates and reconstructs the literary worlding of a minor character, Daisy Simmons – the ‘dark, adorable’ Eurasian woman that Clarissa Dalloway’s longtime admirer, Peter Walsh, plans to marry. If you are thinking about the coupling of Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre you are on the right track.' (Introduction)

'Amani Haydar’s powerful memoir takes its title from Dr Oscar Serrallach’s term ‘the mother wound’, which describes how ‘the relationship between mothers and daughters is affected by unhealed traumatic experiences passed down matriarchal lines’ (333). In her family, Haydar says, the wounds have been inflicted by male aggression, war and migration (329).'  (Introduction)

'Emily Maguire is a Sydney-based author who has written six novels, three non-fiction books and numerous articles on feminism, culture and literature. Her early novels Taming the Beast (2004) and The Gospel According to Luke (2006) were both awarded Special Commendations in the Kathleen Mitchell Awards. Smoke in the Room (2009) and Fishing for Tigers (2012) were followed by the two more recent novels that have had the most impact: An Isolated Incident (2016) – which was shortlisted for both the Stella Prize and the Miles Franklin Award – and Love Objects (2021). Her novels tackle uncomfortable topics such as abusive relationships, intimate partner violence and the ways in which young women are socially conditioned to be ashamed of their own sexuality. In these latter two novels, she deploys alternating perspectives to explore the multifaceted effects of often-traumatic events on her different characters. This in-depth analysis of characters’ motivations and emotional responses mitigates against any simplistic view of ‘good’ and ‘evil’.'(Publication abstract)

'Karen Wyld’s Where the Fruit Falls is an important new novel in the field of Australian Aboriginal literature and a tribute to the work of UWAP under the stewardship of its out-going director Terri-Ann White who, as Wyld says in her Acknowledgements, ‘helped grow UWAP into a treasured Australian publisher’.' (Introduction)

'This book is the first to examine gender and violence in Australian literature. It argues that literary texts by Australian women writers offer unique ways of understanding the social problem of gendered violence, bringing this often private and suppressed issue into the public sphere. It draws on the international field of violence studies to investigate how Australian women writers challenge the victim paradigm and figure women's agencies. In doing so, it provides a theoretical context for the increasing number of contemporary literary works by Australian women writers that directly address gendered violence, an issue that has taken on urgent social and political currency.

'By analysing Australian women's literary representations of gendered violence, this book rethinks victimhood and agency, particularly from a feminist perspective. One of its major innovations is that it examines mainstream Australian women's writing alongside that of Indigenous and minoritised women. In doing so it provides insights into the interconnectedness of Australia's diverse settler, Indigenous and diasporic histories in chapters that examine intimate partner violence, violence against Indigenous women and girls, family violence and violence against children, and the war and political violence.' (Publication summary)

We live in a mobile world characterised by the mass movement of people - both voluntary and involuntary—on an unprecedented scale. One billion people cross borders every year and international migrants account for 3 percent of the world’s population (Standing 90). This diversity is reflected in the Australian population where one in every four workers is a migrant (Standing 90). Roanna Gonsalves’ collection of stories The Permanent Resident (2016) focuses on the so-called ‘second wave’ of Indian immigration to Australia from the 1990s onwards and reflects the ways in which migration impacts one particular community in Australia, namely the Goan Catholic community.1 While one reviewer qualified her whole-hearted praise of Gonsalves’ book with the reservation that, in their focus on Goan Catholics, the stories were ‘limited to one tiny subset of the Indian community’ (Prakash n.p.), I suggest that this targeted focus allows Gonsalves to drill down into the racialised, gendered, class, religious and historical specificities of this community as it negotiates its position(s) within the post-settler white nation. If in this process Gonsalves critiques racialised power relations between the dominant culture and minoritised peoples within the white nation, her fiction also excavates power hierarchies and complicities within the diaporic Goan community. In turn, situating the Goan community as embodying one of the many histories of migration in Australia, this essay takes up literary theorist Jumana Bayeh’s call to theorise minoritised literatures in Australia through the concept of diaspora in order to counteract and challenge the operations of racism in the public sphere. Bayeh quotes Stuart Hall’s comment that ‘diaspora identities are those that are constantly producing and reproducing themselves anew, through transformation and difference’ (Bayeh 85) to argue that the concepts of diaspora and transnationalism can provide an antidote to racial essentialism (Bayeh 85). In their focus on ‘transformation and difference’, Gonsalves’ stories investigate the ways in which migrants remake themselves and develop many different forms of belonging (both to the post-settler Australian nation and to their countries and cultures of origin) as they insert themselves into Australian suburbia. The stories thereby challenge fixed and essentialist categories of race and whiteness in their exploration of the production and reproduction of diasporic identity and subjectivity. In its thematising of diaspora and transnationalism, The Permanent Resident contributes to and extends both the transnational history of Australian literature and the global field of diasporic South Asian literature.' (Introduction)

'The trickster features in a wide range of folkloric, mythic, popular, and literary texts. Spanning antiquity and the contemporary world, tricksters appear in African, Arabic, Asian, Caribbean, European (including Greek, Norse, and Slavic), Pacific, and South American cultures, as well as those of Indigenous peoples in settler nations. Literary trickster figures include the Odyssean wandering hero, the animals in Aesop's fables, the Shakespearean wise fool, and the confidence man in nineteenth-century novels by Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and Mark Twain. More recently, trickster figures have been deployed across a range of minority literatures. Jeanne Rosier Smith, for example, discusses the trickster's recent resurgence in the fiction of what she terms ethnic American women writers., Trickster figures have also appeared in Indigenous writing from both the USA and Canada. '  (Introduction)

'This interdisciplinary book series showcases dynamic, innovative research on contemporary and historical Australian culture. It aims to foster interventions in established debates on Australia as well as opening up new areas of enquiry that reflect the diversity of interests in the scholarly community. The series includes research in a range of fields across the humanities and social sciences, such as history, literature, media, philosophy, cultural studies, gender studies and politics. Proposals are encouraged in areas such as Indigenous studies, critical race and whiteness studies, women’s studies, studies in colonialism and coloniality, multiculturalism, the experimental humanities and ecocriticism. Of particular interest is research that promotes the study of Australia in cross-cultural, transnational and comparative contexts. Cross-disciplinarity and new methodologies are welcomed. The series will feature the work of leading authors but also invites proposals from emerging scholars. Proposals for monographs and high-quality edited volumes are welcomed. Proposals and manuscripts considered for the series will be subject to rigorous peer review and editorial attention. The series is affiliated with the International Australian Studies Association.' (Publication summary)

'In this chapter, Brewster revisits the category of Australian Aboriginal protest poetry to see how its imperatives have changed since the 1980s. The chapter starts with the caveat that not all Aboriginal poetry is protest poetry. However, while Aboriginal poetry has always been written in a wide variety of styles and modes, protest continues to be a prominent constitutive feature of that field. Brewster aims not to privilege protest poetry as the most “authentic”, salient, or even the dominant aesthetic in the field of contemporary Aboriginal poetry but to demarcate it as a discrete body of work, identifying its politico-aesthetics and the cultural work it undertakes.'

Source: Abstract.

'Alice Pung’s postmemoir of the after-effects of political violence maps a discursive trajectory from (1) her father’s survivor memory of the Cambodian genocide, to (2) her own postmemory as a second-generation Asian-Australian, to (3) the latter’s remediation as social memory within the Australian (trans)national imaginary. Hirsch describes the family as ‘the privileged site of the memorial transmission’ of trauma. In Her Father’s Daughter, Pung parallels the heroic narrative of her father’s survival of ‘a real and bloody social revolution’ (HFD, 48) with the more modest narrative of her own embodied travails with ‘authentic feeling’ (21) regarding her affective connectivity with her extended family and the cultural and geographical landscapes they inhabited. Her postmemorial journey is one into her own heart, variously described as ‘a deformed dumpling’ (28) and ‘rotting fruit’ (32). Literary texts such as Pung’s can bring about the timely reanimation of the post-settler state’s archives through investing them with familial forms of mediation and aesthetic expression. In Her Father’s Daughter, disaporic subjectivity is articulated through the mapping of transnational and transgenerational histories.' (Publication abstract)

'This collection is a collaborative cross-racial project that brings Anne Brewster, a white scholar of Aboriginal literature, into conversation with Aboriginal writers about a range of issues that arise directly from their work. Brewster explores the various contexts in which these writers write and in which non-Aboriginal readers read Aboriginal literature. The interviews are accompanied by a survey essay (by Brewster) on each writer’s work which aims to introduce readers to the main themes and issues of each writer.

'The book represents a range of writers. It includes highly acclaimed writers whose works are widely recognised (Kim Scott, Doris Pilkington Garimara, Melissa Lucashenko) and other writers whose works are on the ascendancy (Romaine Moreton and Jeanine Leane). Leane and Moreton have attracted some scholarly attention - for example by being set on educational syllabi and having scholarly work published on it – and their reputation continues to grow nationally and internationally. The book includes interviews with a number of emerging writers whose work is powerful and compelling but has not yet been taken up widely either because it is new (Marie Munkara) or because there has been a lack of confidence on the part of readers in taking up authors outside the present canon (Alf Taylor).

'The interviews make a unique contribution to the understanding of Aboriginal literature and of how these writers developed as writers. While many Aboriginal writers write in part for their own communities, they have expressed their strong desire that their work circulate widely among non-indigenous audiences. This book will facilitate the dissemination of Aboriginal literature and will make use of the valuable literary and cultural resources of the writers themselves in order to enrich and expand the understanding of that literature.

'In these interviews the writers talk about the development of Australian indigenous literature and the conditions which have given rise to their writing. They talk about their childhoods, family histories and the regions in which they have lived. They talk about their education and the books they have read; about the importance of humour, the reasons for their choice of a particular genre and what aesthetic and cultural work they see it as undertaking. They talk about how they conceive of their audiences and issues pertaining to cross-racial scholarship. These are all issues which allow readers to understand their work better. This understanding is further enhanced by the survey essays on each writer’s work.

'Aboriginal literature is a growing field with a rapidly expanding global audience. Unfortunately many students and scholars read only the most recognised and acclaimed writers and betray some hesitation in approaching newer authors. While this book represents three widely recognised writers, it widens the canon of Aboriginal literature by introducing readers to four lesser-known but equally important writers.

'Non-indigenous readers are sometimes unsure about the ethics of cross-racial reading and research - how to approach Aboriginal literature, how to read it, teach it and write about it. By providing rare and valuable insight into the writers’ creative process, into the ways in which they conceive of their audiences and readerships, and into their aspirations for cross-racial understanding, the interviews clarify uncertainties and provide direction for non-Aboriginal readers. They contribute to widespread discussions about the ethics of cross-racial reading, research and scholarship. They provide a timely addition to cultural debates within the public sphere beyond the academy and enable us to better comprehend the turbulent times in which we live.

'This book serves to broaden and deepen current scholarship on the literary works but also to introduce readers to writers they might not have read before. They are both accessible and scholarly. The book also fills a gap by focusing areas of that has been neglected. For example while Lucashenko’s novel Steam Pigs has attracted a lot of critical attention, her second adult novel Hard Yards remains largely unnoticed, a situation this book aims to correct.

'Giving this Country a Memory is an important book for all literature and Australasian collections and well as those of global Indigenous literature.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Anne: Recently you did a performance at the Sydney Biennale, and one of the things that you read there was a poem about feeling and Indigenous cosmology which you followed with a reading from Bill Neidji's work. I was thinking about an earlier conversation we had about your poem "Mud crab" (post me to the prime minister, 5)4 when you said that as an Indigenous person you enter into a social contract by being in a place... can you say something more about that? 

'Romaine: Indigenous cosmology is something that Australians don't hear a lot about, and Indigenous people themselves don't hear a lot about. As far as my work is concerned, understanding Indigenous cosmology is absolutely imperative to understanding the true conflict between Western and Indigenous cosmologies or philosophies. Aboriginal phenomenology is my point of focus in my work. An analysis of the subjective experience of Aboriginality as a constructed identity is very intellectual...' (Introduction)