Cirrus@Austlit

'Ruth Park’s A Power of Roses (1953) focuses on the inhabitants of a boarding house in Sydney’s inner suburb, The Rocks, a diverse community largely sequestered from the modernising city beyond. While the narrative's immersion within the enclave at first holds the larger city at bay, dramatic rooftop visions of the Harbour Bridge begin to open the view. The Bridge in A Power of Roses, as Paul Genoni observes, is richly emblematic of Sydney as a city. But the Bridge is also a figure of ambiguity, conjuring both progressive modernity and an underlying condition of diasporic loss. Through the Bridge, Park’s novel mobilises a poetics of scale and perspective that serves to breach the enclave and to imagine the energies of the wider city. Her young protagonist Miriam McKillop moves outward from the impoverished yet intimate world she inhabits with her beloved Uncle Puss towards adult life in the world beyond. This movement is first anticipated by Miriam’s use of her Uncle Puss’s telescope, which enables her to bridge the distance virtually. Ultimately, however, Miriam’s movement towards the city is a joining premised on an irrevocable separation. This essay considers Park’s mobilisation of scale and perspective for its poetics of the city, and its depiction of the enclave in juxtaposition with the Bridge. It concludes by noting the narrative’s play of perspectives, its crossings of time as well as space, and its uncanny echo of Park’s later retrospective account, in Fishing in the Styx (1993), of her own father’s death.'  (Publication abstract)

'Time, Tide and History: Essays on the Writing of Eleanor Dark is the first book-length edited collection of scholarly essays to treat the full span of Eleanor Dark’s fiction, advancing a recent revival of critical and scholarly interest in Dark’s writing.

'This volume not only establishes a new view of Dark’s fiction as a whole, but also reflects on the ways in which her fiction speaks to our present moment, in the context of a globally fraught, post-pandemic, Anthropocene era. Above all, the revisiting of Dark’s fiction is mandated by a desire to recognise the ways in which it anticipates vital debates in Australian literary and national culture today, about settler colonialism and its legacies, and with regard to the histories, condition and status of Australia’s First Nations people.

'This volume interweaves varied topical themes, from formal debates about modernism, historical realism and melodrama, to questions about modernity’s time and space, about gender and cultural difference, and about the specifics of built and natural environments. Time, Tide and History intentionally loosens the conventions of literary scholarship by including other kinds of work alongside critical and scholarly readings: a written dialogue between two contemporary historians about Dark’s legacy, and a biographical piece on the life and role of Eleanor Dark’s husband, Eric Payten Dark.

'Bringing together the interwar fiction’s feminist and modernist dimensions with the historical turn of The Timeless Land trilogy, the essays in Time, Tide and History collectively pursue ethical and political questions while teasing out the distinctive thematic, formal and aesthetic features of Dark’s fiction.' (Publication summary)

'On 6 August 2023 my colleague, mentor and friend Elizabeth Webby AM, Emeritus Professor of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney, died after a long illness.' 

'Alex Miller’s A Kind of Confession is subtitled “the writer’s private world”. It is comprised of excerpts from his notebooks, diaries and selected letters. Spanning 1961 to 2023, these documents sit at a small but decisive distance from the author, having been curated by his wife, Stephanie Miller.' (Introduction)

'This chapter considers Helen Garners fiction, assessing the evolution of her work from the scandalous diary-like immediacy of the Monkey Grip (1977) through to her minimalist masterpiece The Children’s Bach (1984). Throughout, it considers the house as a core spatial configuration that changes across Garner’s work.' (Publication abstract)

'In 1988, the year that saw publication of Inland, Gerald Murnane gave a talk to an audience at La Trobe University that was subsequently published as “Stream System”.² The talk opened with a seemingly factual account of its author’s morning walk from his nearby suburban home to the Bundoora campus:

'This morning, in order to reach the place where I am now, I went a little out of my way. I took the shortest route from my house to the place that you people probably know as SOUTH ENTRY. That is to say, I walked from the front gate of of my house due west and downhill to Salt Creek then uphill and still due west from Salt Creek to the watershed between Salt Creek and a nameless creek that runs into Darebin Creek. When I reached the high ground that drains into the nameless creek, I walked north-west until I was standing about thirty metres south-east of the place that is denoted on Page 66A of Edition 18 of the Melway Street Directory of Greater Melbourne by the words STREAM SYSTEM.' (Introduction)

'Critics who value Christina Stead’s radical politics often find the passionate excess and the spectral and ambiguous qualities that attend her fiction harder to explain. The political dimensions of Stead’s fiction are further complicated by a scene of writing – most dramatically described in Rowley’s 1993 biography – in which the author draws her material from the lives of close family and friends. The problem is framed in this paper as follows: how can qualities of excess, ambiguity and desire in Stead’s fiction (intimately connected to this scene of writing) be understood in relation to its politics? A substantial notebook acquired in 2007 by the National Library of Australia, dated from mid 1949 to early 1950 and internally designated as the ‘Kelly file’, illuminates Stead’s ten-month process of documenting, researching and transforming raw materials for the novel that was eventually published as Cotters’ England (1967). The notebook sheds new light on Stead’s creative process as one that involved, in Susan Lever’s phrase, ‘living inside the fictions she was making’ (Lever 2003). Patiently observing and capturing her characters, Stead allowed herself to be caught up with them. This paper identifies Stead’s notion of ‘possession’, a doubled and spectral dynamic, as integral to her creative modus operandi. On the one hand this involves the writer in taking possession by means of naturalist observation and classification, and on the other hand it entails being possessed. This is a dynamic that thrives on projection, paranoia, and the willed forgetting of investments. Stead’s theory of ‘spectral England’ – her own political explanation of what ails England – emerges from deep inside a creative process that returns to haunt the finished novel.'

Source: Abstract.