Cirrus@Austlit

'In this paper, three women writers offer a personal and critical consideration of the utopian ideal of a place to write – Woolf’s pervasive ‘room of one’s own’ (1977) – as both a physical location and a psychological and cultural ‘space’. In doing so, we draw on José Esteban Muñoz’s writing on (queer) utopia, particularly his observations about hope and disappointment as critical methodologies through which “a backward glance … enacts a future vision” (p. 4).

'We glance backwards to utopian ideals of a place in which to write and consider how and why such ideal places – solitary, uninterrupted, even beautiful – slip through the writer’s fingers. Again drawing from Muñoz, we consider the tension between hoping for a utopian writing place and disappointment at failing to construct, access, or regularly inhabit them. According to Muñoz, although hope is always eventually disappointed, “disappointment … is not a reason to forsake [hope] as a critical thought process” (p. 10).

'Crucially, then, while we consider the reasons for writerly disappointment with/in writing utopias, we return to hope as a powerful methodology for imagining utopian writing places – enacting future visions – and as a productive and enabling aspect of the writing process.'  (Publication abstract)

'South of the Sun is a curious mixture of tales, poetry, and illustrations. The book has been collaboratively produced by a subcommittee of the Australian Fairy Tale Society (AFTS)—a small not-for-profit organization established in 2013 with the goal of collecting, preserving, discussing, sharing, and creating Australian fairy tales. The anthology brings together works created by members of the society, with a sprinkling of nonmember contributions by more established Australian writers, and includes mostly short stories, with a few poems, and a generous sprinkling of accompanying illustrations.'  (Introduction)

'This chapter explores the shifts between historical and contemporary fairy tale writing and editing. In first considering colonial-era publications, the chapter describes the ways that narratives appropriated from Indigenous culture were framed within a colonial and Western European concept of fairy tale collecting, how experiences of migration were reflected in colonial-era fairy tales, and how early white storytellers attempted to use fairy tales to create an always-already-colonised history of the Australian continent. The chapter then explores how these early traditions have shifted in the (post)colonial context of contemporary writing and publishing, with a move away from editing and publishing Indigenous narratives within a fairy tale context, a more complex approach to using fairy tale characters and stories to explore experiences of migration, and a strong growth in feminist revisionist fairy tales. The chapter argues, finally, that while few works have taken up Donald Haase’s challenge to decolonise fairy tale studies and practice, those that have offer a vision of a uniquely and startlingly Australian mode of transcultural textual production.'

Source: Abstract

'Winter's Tale is an illustrated book about a child called Winter, who has never had a proper home. A child who is looking for parents and a family, and a sense of belonging. A child who sees magic in graffiti and a blue hare in the moon. Who meets a girl with a skateboard and learns to fly; who finds a home, with the most curious of families. Winter's Tale is a story about finding your true self and your true home; about family and belonging; about art, magic and freedom.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'What are regions in Australia? One place to begin to define such a slippery term might be to draw on that of the Regional Australia Institute (RAI) which defines regional Australia as ‘all of the towns, small cities and areas that lie beyond the major capital cities (Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane, Perth, Adelaide and Canberra)’ (RAI 2017a). According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (AIHW), Australians living in these areas:

experience poorer health and welfare outcomes than people living in metropolitan areas. They have higher rates of chronic disease and mortality, have poorer access to health services, are more likely to engage in behaviours associated with poorer health, and are over-represented in the child protection and youth justice sectors. (AIHW)' (Introduction)

'This edited collection brings together research that focuses on historic figures who have been largely neglected by history or forgotten over time. The question of how to recover, reclaim or retell the histories and stories of those obscured by the passage of time is one of growing public and scholarly interest. The volume includes chapters on a diverse array of topics, including semi-biographical fiction, digital and visual biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs, among others. Apart from the largely forgotten, the book provides fresh perspectives on historical figures whose biographies are distorted by their fame or limited by public perception. The subjects explored here include, among others, a child author, a Finnish grandmother, a cold war émigré, an Elizabethan era playwright, a castaway, a celebrated female artist, and the lauded personalities Mary Shelley, Judy Garland and J.R.R. Tolkien. Altogether, the chapters included in this collection offer a much-needed snapshot of new research on biography and its many variations and hybrids which will be of interest to academics and students of biography and life writing in general.'   (Publication summary)

'At the turn of the last century, writers like Atha Westbury and Hume Cook were asking whether Australia had its own fairies, its own fairy tale lore. They attempted to fill the perceived lack of traditional fairy-tale narratives with their own published works of fairy tale. The titles authors chose for their collections – for instance, Olga Ernst’s Fairy tales from the land of the wattle and Annette Kellermann’s Fairy tales of the south seas and other stories – often revealed an overt wish to build a fairy-tale tradition that was distinctly and uniquely Australian. While some of these tales simply relocated existing European tales to the Australian context, most used classic fairy-tale tropes and themes to create new adventures. Other writers and collectors, like K Langloh-Parker, Sister Agnes and Andrew Lang, sought to present Indigenous tales as examples of local folk and fairy tales – a project of flawed good intentions grounded in colonial appropriation. These early Australian publications are largely forgotten and, in many ways, the erasure or forgetting of narratives that were often infused with colonial attitudes to gender, class, race, is far from regrettable. And yet there was a burgeoning local tradition of magical storytelling spearheaded by the delicate fairies of Ida Rentoul Outhwaite’s brush and the gumnut babies of May Gibbs that celebrated the Australian environment, its flora and fauna, populating and decorating new tales for the nation’s children.' (Introduction)

'We were all changed after the war, all monstrous. father had died. Mother had gone mad, Kath had become a journalist. She wore pants and smoked cigarettes. She was still married to Harvey, but when he came back from overseas he had a stump in place of his right leg. It was made from wood of an apple tree ans, if he was feeling playful - which wasn't often - he'd pluck apples from his pockets and say they'd grown there.' (Introduction)

'Samuel and Morgan are twin brothers separated by several oceans. Once, when they were children, they shared a family, a childhood, and a secret imaginary world that had a language of its own: Nahum. But that was decades ago, before Morgan became a wanderer whose only contact with his brother was the Nahum stories, and before Samuel became his brother’s translator.

'When Morgan unexpectedly passes away in the Netherlands, the woman he was living with –the mysterious Ana – agrees to accompany his body, and his final Nahum story, home to Australia. What she carries home to Samuel is not just a manuscript, but a startling revelation.

'In gorgeous and incisive prose, Sulway conjures a haunting, moving story of the complex relationships and allegiances of family life, of silence and memory, and the power of words and the imagination to transform everything.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.