Cirrus@Austlit

'With the increasing success of New Journalism before World War 1, hopes for labour daily papers crystallised. This article speculates on four attempts to counter conservative media as seen through the youthful eyes of Vance Palmer. In London, he participated in the foundation of the successful labour paper the Daily Herald, and he wrote for the British Labour Party daily. Returning to Australia in 1912, he sought to work for a proposed Sydney-based daily paper, and for the successful Queensland’s Labor Daily Standard, as a correspondent. When taking Palmer’s observations into account—drawing on original material from his letters, and set in a context of comparing the four papers—a largely untold story of ambitious design emerges. The scheme of Commonwealth Labor daily newspapers across the nation still lacks its history. Cultural leadership through the commitment of leading men and women, even strike leaders, able to appeal to the passions of writers, editors and readers, and experienced staff utilising an inclusive forum inviting diverse and militant standpoints, may have proved more critical to riding the explosion of radical left idealism in the successful establishment of newspapers, and surviving the suppression of war, than managerial leadership or raising enough economic capital.'(Publication abstract) 

'Helen Huxham (1869-1925) believed that once women achieved universal suffrage across the globe, war was less likely. She shared the widespread hope in women's agency with the international women's movement in their calls, more generally, for international arbitration, and a League of Nations to include women delegates. In 1915, Helen Huxham averred.'  (Publication abstract)

'Nettie Palmer was a prolific and finely honed critic of Australian life and literature'

'During the maelstrom of World War 1, what happened to the strong-minded and courageous women leaders who had fought so long for justice and votes for women?

'Negotiating the End of War begins to answer those questions of how Brisbane's women peace-makers joined together to form a women's peace army, as part of a global movement, to advocate for the permanent end of war.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'Women were at the forefront in the fight for peace in Australia during World War One. Joy Damousi alerted us to their importance and their leading role in their campaign against conscription' in her invaluable study, Women Come Rally.'  (Introduction)

'This special AustLit project is designed to shine a light on the ways that Australian writers are currently addressing and have, in the past, explored what has been correctly described as the most urgent environmental, social, and technological concern of current generations. Post-apocalyptic speculative fiction has explored this territory for some time and now these themes are emerging in other forms of writing. Through this project, we aim to highlight Australian creative and critical writing that examines the impacts of human-induced climate change and to provide necessary contextualising information on the science and consciousness-raising work at the community level.'

Source: AustLit.

'The responses of Australian women’s suffrage leaders in Australia to World War 1 is largely untold except through their biographies. This article revisits the anti-war advocacy of Adela Pankhurst, a member of the leading English suffragette family, when she toured Queensland as a Women’s Peace Army organiser, in 1915, and 1916. Adela Pankhurst’s life and work has had a mixed representation by her biographers and in accounts of her family. In this detailed study of her tours in Queensland, when her life story is viewed through both the lens of state histories and the international campaign against war as a means of solving conflict, her importance as a leading public intellectual emerges.' (Publication abstract)

"These letters provide a remarkable, bird's eye view of the friendship, courtship and love of two `colonial intellectuals' played out in Melbourne, London and Brisbane. Their deep interest in knowledge, ideas and culture shapes their growing commitment to each other - their letters bring a relationship to life and capture a time. The tentative and increasingly passionate youthful correspondence sets the scene and tone for a life-time of collaboration and activism. Reading these moving and tender letters is a timely reminder of the enduring nature of love, the value of partnership, and the importance of engaging with the world." Professor Julianne Schultz, editor of Griffith Review

"The great originality of Deborah Jordan's collection of Vance and Nettie Palmer's love letters is that it shows us not just the private life-the desire, the love, the searching for self-behind the public life of two of Australia's most significant literary figures but the private in the public life and the public in the private life, revealing how their private and public selves were intimately entangled." David Carter, Professor of Australian Literature and Cultural History, University of Queensland

"The Palmers were prolific letter writers and their observations on the people around them, their social and cultural circumstances and the natural world make for rich reading. We are privy to the emotional, intellectual, political and spiritual development of one of the most significant partner - ships in Australian literary history, that of Janet (Nettie) Higgins and Vance Palmer." Elaine Lindsay, author of Rewriting God: Spirituality in Contemporary Australian Women's Fiction

'Vance and Nettie Palmer were among Australia's most important literary partnerships. Previous accounts of their life and work underplay their commitment to the creation of an environmental imagination. After the trauma and disillusion of the Great War, they lived in Caloundra from 1925 to 1929 (and from then had an ongoing connection). While it is generally acknowledged how important their time there was in terms of Vance's emerging work in literary fiction, and through Nettie's work as a freelance journalist, what has not been addressed is their extraordinary environmental writings about the region. Regional writings were largely dismissed in the 1990s as of comparative insignificance to national narratives — just as today the reputation of the inter-war writers, those associated with the Palmers, is at a low ebb. During the 1920s, Nettie developed critical categories to accommodate a double standard in Australian writing: regional and universal literature. She went on to argue for the support of writing in Australia at the regional level. Vance reflected on his explorations of place directly in a series of articles. This paper reframes the Palmers’ Caloundra work in the ‘bio-regional’ terms of climate change and the historical cultural imaginary.' (Abstract)

'‘Today’ writes Dipesh Chakrabarty, it is precisely the ‘survival of the species’ on a ‘world - wide scale’ that is in question and the question for ‘all progressive political thought’. 2 Again and again we are warned by the climate scientists that the human species faces one of its greatest challenges with the warming of the globe. The dire condition of our planet is now more widely recognised; that is the real ‘Eaarth’, 3 which is no longer a garden of Eden, nor pastoral paradise. Australia has warmed by approximately one degree since 1910 and most of the warming has occurred since 1970. 4 Humans barely qualify as an intelligent life form on the planetary scale, because environmental issues are ‘high on the extra -terrestrial age nda’ proposes Linda Jaivin in Rock n Roll Babes From Outer Space (1996). Our ‘barely’ intelligent human life form is responsible for global warming, massive pollution, species depletion and biodiversity loss, toxic methane release, melting ice-caps, increasing intensity of cyclones and rainfall, wildfires and dying forests. This consciousness of planetary change is reflected in recent cautionary climate change narratives; it is timely to re-examine our understandings of the role of the environmental imagination in Australian literature. What follows is merely a preliminary exploration, mere field notes on the approaching catastrophe.' (Author's introduction, 3)

'Several major Australian novels about climate change imagine a warmed planet. This is a timely survey of these cautionary tales. There is also a long tradition of Australians, settlers and Indigenous people, writing about the land and the sea, and about how our climate shapes our communities and our future, and about how colonisation and industrialisation too often destroys our environment. This outline begins to locate, question and frame the insights of many past and present Australian authors about changing climatic conditions.' (Publication summary)