Cirrus@Austlit

'Hosted by the Faculty of Medicine’s Associate Dean (Indigenous Engagement), Maree Toombs, UQ Yarns is a podcast that highlights the amazing work of Individuals dedicated to working with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Communities.'

'Telling stories of a better world...

'The Greek krisis means ‘to decide, a point at which a change must come'. In Queensland, the COVID-19 crisis is altering life in ways that were unimaginable even a few weeks ago. While this is undeniably frightening, as writers we also see it as a moment of possibility.

'We want to inspire you to imagine this as a turning point on the way to a better future. Every two weeks, our UQ writers will reveal a new challenge to help you write a postcard from that future to the world. Then we’ll publish some of our favourites here!'

Source: Project website.

'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 Picture Book Diet is a research project identifying representations of food and food practices in contemporary Australian picture books. What we eat is a topic of robust discussion across the country, yet little attention has been given to the ideas and values concerning food embedded in texts for young children, despite such texts being created with the specific intention not only of entertaining but also of enculturating their audiences, therefore having the potential to influence readers' relationships with food.

This dataset aggregates shortlisted, award-winning and bestselling picture books for 3–8 year-olds published 2000–2013, noting not only food type, but associated depictions of food practices connected with gender, identity and place – such as growing food, shopping, cooking, serving – as well as food-related language use.'

Source: AustLit.

'In The Swan Book (2013), Alexis Wright facilitates productive communication while maintaining the ethical and political importance of irreducible difference. While there are readings of this text that I can and do produce, what is equally important are the moments when my reading cannot proceed, when my reading is stalled by irreducible difference and untranslatability. Close reading and the application of familiar critical frameworks such as postcolonial Gothic or magical realism produce valid political analysis and are an important aspect of my engagement with this text. However, always, The Swan Book pushes back, disrupting any attempt to produce uncomplicated or stable meaning, denying any delusion of knowability or transparency. Its complicated narrative form and opaque poetics create irreducible difference that encourages recognition of the limits of my own reading position. This recognition forms the foundation of an ethical reading practice that allows for communication and exchange but avoids reduction or appropriation of difference. '

‘When he was in gaol, he’d begun to prepare himself for the fight of his life, a showdown with the policeman, McWilliams … he’d face life with death, and see who blinked first.’ 

'Blackie and Rips are fresh out of prison when they set off on a road trip back to Wiradjuri country with their mate Carlos. Blackie is out for revenge against the cop who put him in prison on false grounds. He is also craving to reconnect with his grandmother’s country. 

'Driven by his hunger for drugs and payback, Blackie reaches dark places of both mystery and beauty as he searches for peace. He is willing to pay for that peace with his own life. 

'Part road-movie, part ‘Koori-noir’, Dancing Home announces an original and darkly funny new voice.'

[source: Publisher's website]

The Australian Drama Archive project is a digitisation project publishing plays and research relating to writers working in the period before the 1960s.

Creative-writing PhD, combining a novel and a critical exegesis. The latter explores alternate history and counterfactual fiction, with a focus on Gnosticism.

Why such concern for gestures and more particularly for those gestures related to time and space? Simply because examining these gestures iconic and indexical relation to their natural and cultural environments, both grounded in a specific time and space, can help us formulate a civilization's most fundamental concepts...'' (Source: Backcover)

'These studies focused on the gestural expression of space and time in a comparative perspective were made possible thanks to the constant support provided by the Queensland University Department of Roman Languges, as well as the following research funds: 1987: Aboriginal/Islander Funds Grant and 1992 Australian Research Council Grant.' (Source: Back Cover)

'This thesis investigates the function of humour in the survival of the Aboriginal people against all odds, including the onslaught of invasion, dispossession, powerlessness and oppression since the British invasion in 1788. ' (Source: Abstract)

Kirril Shields considers how, and in what ways, specificities of Australian history and culture have influenced literary representations of the Third Reich perpetrator, bystander and victim. He argues that the depiction of these three roles, in Australian fiction published from the mid-1940s through to the present day, shows some parallels with 'shifts and changes' identified by European scholars in views of the Third Reich, and in perspectives on literary representations of this triad in cultural production. Sheild's contends that Australian fiction enables, in varying degrees, a rearticulation of what may be considered traditional representations of the triad. He argues that that these Australian literary representations also show some extensions of traditional portrayals in Australia and elsewhere, of the Third Reich perpetrator, bystander and victim, in literary and other genres of cultural production.

'A team of anthropologists at UQ - Prof. David Trigger, Kim de Rijke, Tony Jefferies and Charmaine Jones - and former Director of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island Studies Michael Williams recently produced a DVD which contains the digitised ethnographic records of Caroline Tennant-Kelly. These records from the 1930s were recently recovered Kim de Rijke and Tony Jefferies, and they have now been digitised and indexed for the benefit of native title researchers and Aboriginal communities. ' (Source: The University of Queensland website)