Kate Cantrell Kate Cantrell i(A26008 works by)
Gender: Female
The material on this page is available to AustLit subscribers. If you are a subscriber or are from a subscribing organisation, please log in to gain full access. To explore options for subscribing to this unique teaching, research, and publishing resource for Australian culture and storytelling, please contact us or find out more.

Works By

Preview all
1 ‘Stop Talking and Start Doing.’ Rosie Batty on Trolls, Accidental Advocacy and Treating Domestic Violence for What It Is: Terrorism Kate Cantrell , 2024 single work review
— Appears in: The Conversation , 30 April 2024;

— Review of Hope Rosie Batty , 2024 single work autobiography

'It is ten years since Rosie Batty’s 11-year-old son Luke was murdered by his father during cricket practice. Last week, amid a national crisis of violence against women, Batty reiterated her plea for family violence to be called what it is: intimate terrorism.' (Introduction)

1 Leah Purcell’s Is That You, Ruthie? Is a Powerful Look at ‘Dormitory Girls’ Separated from Country and Family Kate Cantrell , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: The Conversation , 19 December 2023;

— Review of Is That You, Ruthie? Leah Purcell , 2023 single work drama

'Aunty Ruth Hegarty, or Ruthie, was four-and-a-half years old when she was forcibly removed from her mother, Ruby, under the auspices of Queensland’s Aboriginals Protection Act (1897).' (Introduction)          

1 From Stage to Page to Screen : The Traumatic Returns of Leah Purcell's 'the Drover's Wife' Nycole Prowse , Jessica Gildersleeve , Kate Cantrell , 2022 single work criticism
— Appears in: Social Alternatives , November vol. 41 no. 3 2022; (p. 30-36)
'In an interview with Harcourt, the American short story writer and novelist George Singleton uses a spatial analogy to compare the process of writing long- and short-form fiction. Singleton (2006) says, ‘Writing a novel is a walk across a bridge, while writing a short story is a walk across a tightrope.’ Singleton’s analogy captures the experiential differences of writing long and short prose and alludes to the characteristics that distinguish the short story as an enduring form: narrative economy, unity of effect or impression, and importantly, the compression of the story’s temporal setting and characters. In fact, while both the novel and the short story share the same formal characteristics (plot, point of view, dialogue, setting), the novel depends on expansion, the short story on compression. The process of adaptation is a complex project of reconfiguration: one that is not only governed by ethical issues and aesthetic tensions but by the various social, cultural, and political issues that arise in the calibration of old stories for new times, new audiences, and new medias. As Demelza Hall (2019) explains, ‘Works of adaptation are renowned for “talking back” to a text, while, at the same time, opening up new spaces and establishing new dialogues.’ In this context, it is interesting to consider the process of adapting the short story to the longer form, or as Singleton suggests, transitioning from tightrope to bridge. Since the past can be either contested or conserved, rewritten or reinstated, the act of retelling always necessitates thinking about the relationship between the story and history itself.' (Introduction)
1 Everyone Loves Bandit from Bluey – but Is He a Lovable Larrikin, or Just a Bad Dad? Dave Burton , Kate Cantrell , 2022 single work column
— Appears in: The Conversation , 10 June 2022;
1 Tsiolkas in the Classroom : Confronting Our Discomfort Jessica Gildersleeve , Kate Cantrell , Nycole Prowse , Sharon Bickle , India Bryce , 2021 single work criticism
— Appears in: Antipodes , vol. 35 no. 1 2021; (p. 83-101)

'The name Christos Tsiolkas may as well be a synonym for “controversial.” The term peppers most critical and popular articles about the writer’s work, such that what Zuckerman terms Tsiolkas’s “provocations” almost no longer bear comment. Yet for first-year students of Australian literature, such content may not be as commonplace as this discourse suggests. Indeed, the provocations of the Tsiolkas oeuvre, despite their affiliation with key genres and concerns of contemporary Australian literature, may prove too confronting or too overwhelming for the novice literary critic. This article maps a range of issues arising from the study of Tsiolkas’s work in a first-year Australian literature course at a regional university in Australia. With a particular focus on what is perhaps the author’s most controversial work, Dead Europe (2005), we consider why Tsiolkas’s narratives can be so difficult for literary studies students and outline how the use of reflective practice offers a safe space for engaging with such “triggering” work.' (Publication abstract)

1 Map-Scrapping i "Behold the island!", Kate Cantrell , 2021 single work poetry
— Appears in: Coolabah , no. 29 2021; (p. 61-62)
1 Reluctant Wandering : New Mobilities in Contemporary Australian Travel Writing Kate Cantrell , 2020 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature 2020; (p. 353-364)

'Travel has always been an important trope of settler literature, central not only to colonial displacement and dispossession but to postcolonial reimaginings of identity, gender, and place. However, it was not until the early twentieth century, after the rise of literary nationalism, that a nativist form of travel writing emerged in Australia. By mid-century, there was a more established tradition due to the introduction of motor touring and a post-war boom in mass migration and tourism. In the 1970s and 1980s, Australian travel writing was chiefly preoccupied with road stories, and with narratives of risk and adventure, while in the 1990s, Indigenous writers imagined new possibilities for healing through travel writing that sought to recover ancestral connections to language and land. Today, Australian travel writing is a burgeoning subject of academic enquiry, and in Australia, as elsewhere, there is a broadening rather than narrowing perspective of what constitutes ‘travel’ writing. Recently, an upsurgence of interest in mobility studies has raised new questions, not only about the experience of moving (and being moved), but about how different theories of im/mobility are central to the way travel is practised and prohibited, and sometimes undertaken reluctantly.'

Source: Abstract

1 Jenga, Kafka, and the Triumph Of Academic Capitalism : A Taxonomy of Scholars and Their COVID Capital Kate Cantrell , Kelly Palmer , 2020 single work essay
— Appears in: Axon : Creative Explorations , December vol. 10 no. 2 2020;
'As universities around Australia sever entire schools and faculties, others face collapse entirely. An over-dependence on international revenue and an unhappy marriage with the federal government had many universities already feeling some discomfort before COVID-19 exacerbated the pain. Whether universities rapidly decline, or languish and recover, they will undoubtedly see more violent restructuring as they transition into the recovery and renewal phase. In the meantime, the absence of any tangible assistance from the government, combined with mostly short-sighted cost reduction strategies, mean that a sector-wide crisis has now been left to individual universities to manage alone. As Teresa Tija et al. explain, ‘The immediate response of Australian universities was to defer capital works spending, reduce non-salary expenditure, scale back the use of casual and fixed-term staff, and introduce other short-term measures’ (2020: 3). These emergency surgeries, which in many cases have been performed without anaesthesia, reveal that universities need a more innovative ethical strategy for triaging and treating the many systemic disorders that the virus has not only aggravated but also exposed. As several academics have already observed, Australian universities were sick before the pandemic (Kunkler 2020; Zaglas 2020). Indeed, the commodification and destruction of ‘all the collective institutions capable of counteracting the effects of the infernal machine’ (Bourdieu 1998: 4) ensures that those commodified most — that is, the precariat — can do little to save the university from its self-cannibalising tendencies.' (Introduction)
1 Things You Lost in 2020 i "Your name", Kate Cantrell , 2020 single work poetry
— Appears in: Westerly , vol. 65 no. 2 2020; (p. 140-141)
1 Crackers Kate Cantrell , 2019 single work short story
— Appears in: Hecate , vol. 45 no. 1/2 2019; (p. 289-308)
1 Double Trouble : The Teacher/Satirist Duality in Thea Astley’s Critical Writings Kate Cantrell , Lesley Hawkes , 2019 single work criticism
— Appears in: Queensland Review , December vol. 26 no. 2 2019; (p. 218-231)

'Over a fifty-year period, from 1944 to 1994, Thea Astley published a number of critical writings, including essays, newspaper articles and reviews, and short reflections and meditations on her craft. Despite a renewed interest in Astley’s work, however, most critical interrogations of her oeuvre focus on her novels, and more recently her poetry. As a result, Astley’s critical writing has not been afforded the same breadth and depth of investigation as her fiction. This lacuna is troubling, since Astley’s critical works are important not only for their insight, but for what they reveal about Astley’s self-representation, and in particular the dual identity that she embodied as both a teacher and a satirist. This article argues that these dual roles emerge clearly in Astley’s essays and in fact are inextricable from many of her works. Further, the tensions between these two personae — Astley as teacher and Astley as satirist — reveal natural overlaps with her imaginative writing, and reflect her changing ideas about fiction writing, literature, and education.' (Publication abstract)

1 Girl with a Monkey i "Anti-communist propaganda", Kate Cantrell , 2019 single work poetry
— Appears in: Queensland Review , December vol. 26 no. 2 2019; (p. 217)
1 Wandering with Wi-Fi : The Wandering Trend in Women’s Travel Blogs Kate Cantrell , 2019 single work criticism
— Appears in: TEXT Special Issue Website Series , October no. 56 2019;
'Despite the continued popularity of travel blogs, there is a lack of contemporary criticism concerning the literal and figurative meanings of ‘wandering’ in the genre of online travel writing. One only has to trawl through the blogosphere to notice the number of female travellers who refer to themselves as ‘wandering’ women. However, female wandering has received little to no study in travel writing scholarship. In other words, what a ‘wandering woman’ is exactly – for example, why she wanders and how, as well as what constitutes an act of wandering – is yet to be widely theorised. Furthermore, the subversive tendency of female wandering to disrupt not only circular journeys but also stable conceptualisations of home has not been deeply explored. This paper argues that female wandering is a complex mode of travel that is characterised by the coupling of literal and figurative movement, and therefore it cannot be conceptualised through canonical understandings of departure and return. In the travel blogs presented for analysis, the authors construct non-linear narratives that are marked by boundlessness, continuity, and self-reflexivity. In this way, the blogs themselves are ‘wandering’ texts that marry the physical wandering of the body with the abstract wondering of the mind. As a result, wandering is not only the content of the blog but the defining characteristic of the text itself. When female bloggers cast themselves as wandering women, they resist the Romantic equation of wandering with suffering, and instead construct wandering as a shared reprieve rather than an individual burden. This representation of female wandering as a positive and productive endeavour is interesting given literary representations of male wandering as a curse or punishment.'

 (Publication abstract)

 
1 The Five Stages of Grief i "In the 1960s", Kate Cantrell , 2019 single work poetry
— Appears in: Cordite Poetry Review , 1 November no. 93 2019;
1 No Safety in Numbers Kate Cantrell , 2019 single work review
— Appears in: TEXT Special Issue Website Series , June no. 54 2019;

— Review of The Geography of Friendship Sally Piper , 2018 single work novel
'In 1993, Mary Morris, in her compilation of women’s travel writing, Maiden voyages, observed that women, while travelling, are always vulnerable to sexual violence: ‘the fear of rape, for example, whether crossing the Sahara, or just crossing a city street at night’ (Morris 1993: xvii). Twenty-five years later, the reality remains. In June 2018, three weeks before Sally Piper launched her new novel, The geography of friendship, Melbourne comedian Eurydice Dixon was raped and murdered in Carlton North while walking home from a Melbourne bar.' 

 (Introduction)

1 Mutations i "Solomon said", Kate Cantrell , 2018 single work poetry
— Appears in: Meniscus , November vol. 6 no. 2 2018; (p. 125-126)
1 The Satin Man i "The summer I turned seven", Kate Cantrell , 2018 single work poetry
— Appears in: Meanjin , Summer vol. 77 no. 4 2018; (p. 125)
1 With the Confidence of a Magician Kate Cantrell , 2018 single work review
— Appears in: TEXT : Journal of Writing and Writing Courses , October vol. 22 no. 2 2018;

— Review of Trick of the Light : Stories Laura Elvery , 2018 selected work short story

'A trick is an action or scheme that is designed to deceive, but a trick of the light is something more benevolent, closer as it is to an optical illusion or an architectural charm. A trick can take the form of a prank or a hoax, but a trick of the light isn’t planned. If you trick someone, you deliberately outwit them. But if you encounter a trick of the light, what you see is not a gimmick but a distinct impression: an effect caused by the way the light falls on a thing and makes that thing, which doesn’t exist, appear to be real.'  (Introduction)

1 Finding Space and Time in the West Kate Cantrell , 2014 single work column
— Appears in: Writing Queensland , February no. 237 2014; (p. 12-13)
1 Shades of Grey i "The zoo-keeper tells me his elephants", Kate Cantrell , 2012 single work poetry
— Appears in: Islet
X