Cirrus@Austlit

'Ronnie Scott is an RMIT academic and co-founder of the literary journal The Lifted Brow. His debut novel, The Adversary (2020), set mainly in the Melbourne suburb of Brunswick, was a wry exploration of the nuances of house sharing and online dating.'

'It would be unbearable to think this story should lie untold. Drawn from her mother’s personal memoir and her own memories and archives, Houen writes about their hardworking passionate lives in a Godforsaken but picturesque patch of marginal land on the banks of the Murrumbidgee in Hay, NSW. Water shortage then was a family battle and now it is a national and global one, with foreign water ownership in the Murray-Darling basin at 20.9% (Chan 2019).' (Introduction)

'The unsettled South Australian frontier near Mount Gambier is a strange and difficult place for a Galway family trying to make sense of their new world.

'Rosanna and brother Skelly long to escape. Their older brother Edwin races against poets in steeplechases and schemes over cattle, carts and cards to get ahead. They are all half in love with a visiting priest and a disturbing Irish play about their ancestors. 

'When she goes to work at a nearby station, Rosanna is caught up in a string of events—throwing a horserace, the allure of a visiting actor, violent threats to her Boandik friends, and the wreck of the Admella—that lead to a reckoning with the land, its histories, its religions and its ancient and recent cultures.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'The death of an aunt, criminal charges against her daughter, and family management of that crisis drove me into research. The charge together with the press coverage of the case brought collective family shame. I wrote first to understand my cousin’s plight and secondly to avoid conflict with my father. Most writers draw on experiences shared with or contested by others. Some transform source characters in order to analyse ideas in cognitive mode but at arm’s length; others write to bear witness. Life writers frequently write perceivably true accounts. This paper will assert writers right to research experiences that belong to others whilst respecting vulnerable subjects. It relies on Anna Denejkina’s proposed model exo-autoethnography – that is writing trauma vicariously suffered through family or personal connections – for the purpose of representing and clarifying complex problems, short-circuiting authorial paralysis, and expanding empathy.'  (Publication abstract)

Epigraph: The essay attempts to surround something - a subject, a mood, a problematic irritation - by coming at it from all angles, wheeling and diving like a hawk, each seemingly digressive spiral actually taking us closer to the heart of the matter. - Phillip Lovate: 1987 xxxviii

'Matilda had a thing about arrivals. On planes, even when not working on foreign policy, she wore tailored suits and carried a valise, as if on her way to an important meeting, or in the event of becoming ejected, disembodied over enemy territory, needing to command as much respect as a man, as Roosi, for instance, or any of her colleagues. Nothing could be done about shots fired by narcissistic young men. One had killed her brother...' (Introduction)