Cirrus@Austlit

'Ruth Park’s The Harp in the South (1948) and its sequel, Poor Man’s Orange (1949), famously deal with the Irish denizens of Sydney’s Surry Hills slums in the 1940s. This essay seeks to explore the implications of Irishness in these novels, and in the later prequel Missus (1985). The Harp in the South, almost exclusively populated by Irish migrants, stands also as a ‘classic Australian novel’. The characterology draws on transnational tropes of Irishness with a long genealogy that find a new context in the Australian imaginary. The essay explores the ambivalence between hereditarian and cultural notions of Irishness, the way Irish ‘blood’ is foregrounded and resisted, and its tension with Irish ‘names’.  The merging of Irish and Australian that the novel promises can only be achieved through omissions and lacunae, especially around questions of colonisation and Indigenous dispossession. Blood and names, we argue, become ways of both evacuating history and summoning it, of opening up allegiances and shutting them down, of appealing to essences and origins, and troubling them at the same time. Ultimately though, whether Irish or Indigenous, blood and names are haunted by the ghosts of ancestors from both near and far.'  (Publication abstract)

'Eighty years ago, an exciting new poet was published in the modernist literary journal Angry Penguins. Of course, we all know now that Ern Malley was a hoax, so it can be easy to overlook just how blindsided Max Harris, Angry Penguins’ precocious young editor, must have been.'

'Even within the humanities, the discipline of English is unusually diverse in both its object of study, and its approaches and methodologies. It has multiple subfields and frequently aligns with other disciplines including creative writing, cultural studies, and theatre/screen studies. As Ronan McDonald explains:

A typical department of English … might include one faculty member working on a research-funded project with colleagues from the sciences on neurological dimensions to narrative, another researching the philology of Icelandic quest narratives, another working on performativity and gender in relation to contemporary urban street theater, and another working on neglected social histories of Jacobean chapbooks. All these projects are informed by diverse agendas and methods and would provide widely different accounts of their raison d’être. (3)

'The porousness of its disciplinary identity is what makes English studies so compelling. However, this openness may also make it difficult to survive let alone flourish in the metric-driven rankings culture that currently dominates the academy, and which frequently determines institutional priorities as well as the flow of funding. Moreover, in the Australian context, waves of restructures have seen many English departments folded into larger institutional entities with which they are more or less aligned.' (Introduction)

'Say, you’re a school teacher in the Kimberley region of Western Australia, and you’re looking for a play for your class to perform that is set in Broome. Or maybe you’re a crime writer playing with the idea of writing a novel set in Sydney and want to check out what other crime novels have been set there. Perhaps you just found out that your great aunt once wrote a series of poems, and you want to know more. It could even be that you’re an author wanting to find the reviews of your latest short story collection. All this, and more, can be found in AustLit. Scholars of Australian literature know how valuable AustLit has been for over two decades, but anyone with an interest in Australian literary culture will find something worth exploring in Australia’s national literary database. AustLit will not only answer your questions, it will surely inspire more.' (Introduction)

'Australians are nervous about AI. Efforts are underway to put their minds at ease: advisory committees, consultations and regulations. But these actions have tended to be reactive instead of proactive. We need to imagine potential scenarios before they happen.' (Introduction)

'It is 1992, the year of the Mabo judgment, and Helen, a scholarship student from Tasmania, is undertaking a PhD at Cambridge, writing a thesis titled ‘Cryptomodernism and Empire’. It is on Joseph Conrad, a writer about whom her peers are contemptuous. Helen is dealing with a forlorn and dismissive supervisor, and the disappointment that her experience abroad was not what she had expected. Her ‘fantasy of vigorous literary talk, multisyllabic and theoretical, was soon defeated’.' (Introduction)

'Boundary Crossers offers a history of bushrangers who have been forgotten, misremembered or neglected. Meg Foster’s central premise in Boundary Crossers is that “not all bushrangers were white men”, and she offers case studies of four “other” bushrangers to prove it. William Douglas, for example, was a widely feared African-American bushranger on the goldfields of Victoria in the 1850s, to whom two chapters are devoted. There is a chapter each on Sam Poo, a Chinese man accused of bushranging in the 1860s, and Mary Ann Bugg, a Worimi Aboriginal woman who lived on the run with her better-known white bushranging partner, Captain Thunderbolt, and two final chapters on Jimmy Governor, a self-styled bushranger popularised in Thomas Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. Each chapter sketches out its subject’s backstory, to which Foster adds details and context to paint a more complex picture.' (Introduction)

'Despite recognition that the use of journal rankings in research assessment is problematic, they are implicitly or explicitly used by institutions to evaluate individual researchers. This essay reports on a study we undertook on behalf of the Australian University Heads of English (AUHE) investigating research assessment policies within the field of English, and their impact on academics’ publishing strategies and careers. After an initial online questionnaire, we conducted follow-up interviews with twenty-seven Australian literary studies academics from a range of institutions and at varying academic levels. Given generally widespread scepticism about the role of journal rankings in measuring quality, we asked these academics how they think literary studies can and should be evaluated. What we discovered was a broad and rich range of responses to this challenging question, as well as various creative ways literary studies academics negotiate questions of value in relation to institutional priorities and modes of evaluation. This paper suggests that broadening conceptions of value may be an important strategic response to the current institutional context in Australia.' (Publication abstract) 

'I was reading Noongar author Claire G. Coleman’s third novel, Enclave, a few days after the US Supreme Court overturned the Roe v Wade judgement, a political victory for a conservative project many years in the making.' (Introduction)

'On 25 September 2020, the ABC released a documentary film to mark the twentieth anniversary of Cathy Freeman’s gold medal victory in the women’s 400 metres at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. Media interest in Freeman’s victory still erupts periodically, most recently, to commemorate the twentieth anniversary. This article revisits Cathy Freeman’s historic gold-medal-winning performance in order to ponder the lost promise of reconciliation. At the time, and still today, Freeman’s victory is overwhelmingly celebrated as more than just an athletic feat; it is also lauded as a victory for reconciliation. Rather than trying to determine the extent to which Freeman’s race did bolster reconciliation, or even whether it contributed to reconciliation at all, this article instead analyses the metaphors, rhetoric and images through which Freeman’s victory was represented as an act of reconciliation, and what this tells us about how reconciliation plays out in the Australian context. In particular, it argues that the complex ways in which Freeman’s victory were represented, and continue to be understood, reveal a widespread desire to be free from the burdens of history by projecting the work of reconciliation onto Freeman herself.' (Publication abstract)

'This article considers some of the reasons why Irish-Australian literature has not been a significant trajectory within Australian literary studies and what it might offer if it were. Since the colonial era, Irish difference has been both recalcitrant and assimilable but, in the wake of Federation in 1901, Australian literature was concerned with the production of a national tradition and Irishness served to differentiate Australianness from Britishness. This article is concerned, then, with retrieving Irish difference. It extends my longstanding interest in Indigenous Australian literatures by analysing the representation of Irish Australians in Indigenous Australian writing, particularly moments of solidarity between the Irish and Indigenous Australians. After looking briefly at representations of colonial relations between the Irish and Aboriginal Australians in Jack Davis’ 1979 play Kullark and Eric Willmot’s historical novel Pemulwuy (1989), this article offers a reading of a minor scene in Alexis Wright’s Miles Franklin Literary Award-winning novel Carpentaria, published in 2006, as a way of exploring such representations in the contemporary era. This article is not trying to generate a new category for the field of Australian literary studies. Rather, it follows a seam within the Australian literary tradition that imagines generative forms of allegiance that may complicate existing conceptions of the Australian literary field.'

Source: Abstract.

'In a famous – perhaps too famous – proclamation, the late historian Patrick O’Farrell (1933–2003) declared that the ‘distinctive Australian identity was not born in the bush, nor at Anzac Cove: these were merely situations for its expression. No; it was born in Irishness protesting against the extremes of Englishness’ (O’Farrell 12). There has been a tradition of thinking about the Irish in Australia as the grit in the oyster, a recalcitrant internal other that allows Australia to emerge as a national pearl distinct from Britain. Yet, arguably, the separatism-assimilation binary, and the presumptions about nation-building upon which it is built, has not received sufficient critical treatment in recent decades as theories of diaspora, settler colonialism and cultural encounter have developed. Historiography about the Irish in Australia, over which O’Farrell’s presence still dominates, has ebbed in recent years as the attention has turned to Indigenous histories and to the waves of migration that have occurred since the Second World War.[^1] The fractious yet formative role of the Irish presence has tended to be papered over by terms like ‘Anglo-Celtic’ or ‘British’ Australia. Indeed, if Noel Ignatieff told the story of ‘how the Irish became white’ in the United States, perhaps in Australia the equivalent narrative is ‘how the Irish became British’, an identification which, as Elizabeth Malcolm recently pointed out, is remarkably ill-fitting: ‘Catholic Irish people do not usually consider themselves British and nor do most British people think of the Irish as British either. Australian usage of the category “British” to include the Catholic Irish is unusual’ (Malcolm 201).'

Source: Abstract.

'At the turn of the century, John Guillory made the grand claim that reading is ‘the principle ethical practice of modernity.’ For Guillory, the persistent gap between what he refers to as professional (or academic) and lay modes of reading is the key reason why we have not been able to recognise reading as an ethical practice. This paper explores this claim and teases out its implications through the lens of shared reading and suggests that the phenomenon of the book club may well be one of the principal ethical spaces of modernity. In thinking through this question, this paper outlines a range of arguments in relation to the ethics of reading and draws on recent theorisations of post-critique, which has also advocated a commitment to overcoming the distance between academic and lay readers.

What does it mean to be an ethical reader? Is it an attitude that one brings to a text, or is it a mode or practice of reading? If so, what would that practice look like? How does one become an ethical reader? Does it require disciplinary training, or does reading ethically pay no heed to literary features? Can an ethical relation to a text be established in advance – or does it emerge through the process and practice of reading? And, more pertinent to this collection, but also more speculatively, is there a national dimension to these questions – is there an Australian ethics of reading?' 

Source: Abstract.

'This article proposes a reading of Alexis Wright’s epic novel Carpentaria that focuses on the mine and its impacts as central to any understanding of the novel. Carpentaria offers a stark portrayal of how resource extraction is intimately linked with both colonisation and capitalism and is sustained through state-sanctioned violence and nationalist ideologies. This article explores the dichotomy between Normal Phantom, who views mining as just another phenomenon in the vast expanse of time, and his son Will, who fights the mine on the understanding that it is an unprecedented threat to the survival of the Waanyi people and their Country. Although I suggest that this wider debate, and the forms of agency it represents, remains unresolved in the novel, I conclude with a meditation on the critically neglected character of Kevin who complicates the novel’s uneasy resolution. In the light of ongoing debates about the Adani mine, Carpentaria is more relevant than ever.' (Publication abstract)

'Although the 2018 Closing the Gap report on Indigenous disadvantage highlighted the importance of literacy for Indigenous Australians, progress remains slow. But, while reading is widely considered an unmitigated good and a marker of prestige, it is not a simple issue for some Indigenous Australians.' (Introduction)

'Liliana Zavaglia’s White Apology and Apologia: Australian Novels of Reconciliation uses the trope of the double movement of apology and apologia to analyse a number of recent, culturally significant novels of reconciliation—determined interventions of literary activism—by white (liberal) Australian authors: two of Alex Miller’s novels—Journey to the Stone Country (2002) and Landscape of Farewell (2002); Andrew McGahan’s The White Earth (2004); Kate Grenville’s The Secret River (2005); and Gail Jones’ Sorry (2007). Zavaglia’s analysis is book-ended by two non-literary texts, the Mabo Judgement of 1992 and Kevin Rudd’s 2008 ‘Apology to the Stolen Generations in 2008,’ representing the two key events that flank the publication of these novels.' (Introduction)

'This article explores the cultural work of the Townsville-based Murri (Indigenous) Book Club. Although a growing body of research relates to book clubs in Britain and the US, little work has been done in the Australian context on what Marilyn Poole has called, ‘one of the largest bodies of community participation in the arts in Australia’ (280). The work that has been done, moreover, suggests that book clubs are an overwhelmingly white phenomenon, through which members ‘maintain their currency as literate citizens through group discussion’. But what of an Indigenous book club and its concerns? This article asserts that the Murri book club challenges traditional book club expectations through its very different relationship to cultures of books and reading. In doing so, the Murri book club has taken a white, middle-class practice and reshaped it for its own purposes: decolonizing the book club as a social, cultural and political institution. By examining the origins of the book club, its approach to books and the lives of some of its members, this article also suggests that the Murri book club challenges expectations about Indigenous professionals and offers insight into the complex ways in which Indigenous professionals negotiate their identities and their relationships with other readers, through communal literary networks.' (Publication abstract)

'Many of the articles in this issue of Journal of Australian Studies draw upon oral history and other qualitative methodologies. This process of listening carefully to the stories people tell about their lives is one of the most important ways an interdisciplinary journal such as this contributes to sharing ideas and histories that help us make sense of our worlds. Often these approaches accompany a reimagining of traditional historical practice.' (Introduction)

'An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including young women of Australia, Indigenous music, and a book review of "Dreams of Speaking".' (Publication abstract)