Cirrus@Austlit

'This is the first scholarly collection dedicated to the writing and voice of New Zealand-Australian author Ruth Park. Known for novels that have achieved both popular success and critical acclaim – such as The Harp in the South (1948) and Playing Beatie Bow (1980), both of which remain in print – Park’s career has involved an unusual blend of wide-ranging public appeal and literary distinction. In addition to her nine adult novels and over twenty children’s books, including the long-running, multi-volume Muddleheaded Wombat series (1962–1982), Park also produced significant works of journalism, rigorously researched history, and travel writing, most notably The Companion Guide to Sydney (1973), and wrote countless radio plays. Yet, despite these accomplishments, her oeuvre has been somewhat overlooked in academic circles, where her popular and professional success appears to have deterred a deeper examination of the literary qualities of her work.'  (Introduction)

'Fiona McFarlane is known for her gripping narratives of psychological complexity and haunted Australian spaces.'

'Ruth Park’s novels The Harp in the South (1948) and Poor Man’s Orange (1949) portray a fictional Irish-Australian family living in the actual inner-city neighbourhood of Surry Hills. The poor, immigrant status of the Darcys is foregrounded in the novels from the start, yet equally important is the character of Aboriginal man Charlie Rothe, who is introduced in Chapter 14 of The Harp in the South. This essay suggests that Charlie’s late arrival is the reverse of the non-fictional situation evoked in the opening of Park’s The Companion Guide to Sydney (1973), in which the author imagines the First Fleet’s entry into a place that was already occupied. The issue of ‘first-ness’, and what comes after, is central to Park’s narration of both family intimacy and romantic love between her Irish Australians and latecomer Charlie. Highlighting enigmatic descriptions of Charlie’s Aboriginal parentage and ancestry and associating this language with the appropriative desire felt by each of the Darcy sisters, I argue that the character of Charlie is pivotal to Park’s exploration of themes of imitation, borrowing, possession and (belated) recognition.' (Publication abstract)

'Ruth Park’s novel The Harp in the South (1948) is a classic of Australian fiction. Just as television viewers in recent decades would recognise “Ramsay Street” as the fictional centre of Australia’s longest-running television soap opera Neighbours, earlier generations of readers would have recognised with affection “Twelve-and-a-half Plymouth Street”: the hearth and home of Harp’s fictional Irish-Australian family, the Darcys.'

'Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan’s new study The Teaching Archive both excavates and interprets the syllabi and other classroom-related archives of ten tertiary English-literature courses, providing in the process what the authors call a ‘true history’ of the literary studies discipline as it was taught by a variety of English and American teachers over the course of the twentieth century. Through its textual tracing of a selection of classroom-based materials, methods and practices, The Teaching Archive brings to light a diverse methodological history, revising in the process critical assumptions and platitudes about the discipline that extend from the twentieth-century to our present moment. After reading Buurma and Heffernan we can no longer say, for example, that the pre-1968 Anglo-American classroom was the bastion of canonical reading and writing practices that—upholding antiquated, narrowly technical or formalist methods complicit with hierarchical structures—only began to unravel once universities and other tertiary-education institutions conformed to social diversity and inclusion policies. After 1968, so the story goes, the New Criticism, with its championing of the close reading method that had previously dominated the teaching of Anglophone literary studies, was gradually replaced by thematic or area studies approaches with their culture- or identity-based methods. Along with the move away from close-reading as the core literary studies method, the post-1968 emergence of feminist and queer, race, ethnic and other area studies contributed to a movement away from the teaching of the English Literature canon.' (Introduction)

'This special section of Australian Humanities Review, entitled ‘Unfinished Business: Apology Cultures in the Asia Pacific’, arose out of a Monash University Arts Faculty Interdisciplinary Research Project of the same name. This project brought together an interdisciplinary team across the fields of Literary Studies, History, Film, and Cultural Studies, encompassing aspects of law, human rights and ethics. The project sought to understand how various forms of cultural practice and narrative mediate our comprehension of the past and of ongoing human interactions within and between nation-states, in particular, of past, present and future social and cultural interactions that coalesce around the material and symbolic consequences of apology in the Asia Pacific region.' (Editorial Introduction)

'Ruth Park’s Playing Beatie Bow (1980) is a fantastical, time-travel novel that is also fascinated with lived history. It is especially interested in the question of how, that is through what means and forms, our past is remembered and mediated. Do we remember the past through what is recorded in official archives and taught on school and university curricula? Or are there other ways of accessing what took place before our own time? It is a children’s nursery rhyme and a discarded piece of old cloth that enable the transportation of Playing Beatie Bow‘s Abigail Kirk back to Sydney’s The Rocks in 1873, suggesting that popular song and ephemeral objects can open historical horizons and be the catalyst for reconstructing meaningful stories.' (Introduction)

In 1995 Latrobe University won a grant from the AVCC Electronic Publishing Working Group to develop 'an electronic journal in the humanities, spanning a range of disciplines and genres'. Modelled on the Stanford Humanities Review, the first issue of the Australian Humanities Review became available online in April 1996.

Australian Humanities Review is a peer-reviewed interdisciplinary electronic journal founded by Cassandra Pybus. It is published quarterly with regular updates every two weeks. Edited by Elizabeth McMahon since 1998 with assistance from an Editorial Board, AHR has also received funding from the Australia Council and the Cultural Activities Committee of the University of Tasmania.

Australian Humanities Review commisions 'target articles' for each issue and also presents excerpts from articles previously published elsewhere. In addition the electronic journal provides an interactive discussion forum where writers can post short responses to articles and reviews. Each issue is accessible through an online archive which allows users to browse the content by issue or subject matter.

The Australian Humanities Review attracts contributions from a wide range of disciplines, including history, cultural studies and literary studies, facilitating an ongoing discussion on developments in Australian culture as they occur.