Cirrus@Austlit

'At the opening of the Federal Parliament’s Senate Chamber in August 2022, Senator Pauline Hanson staged a demonstration against the Acknowledgement of Country, including a prepared media statement and a performative walkout from the chamber. The act of acknowledging Ngambri and Ngunnawal Country was, Hanson stated, not a traditional custom and was a “divisive” one. As a non-Indigenous academic in the tertiary sector, I want to explore how pedagogy can create a site to reflect this public conversation and take it much further than the media cycle.' (Publication abstract)

'On a recent award-judging panel, I found myself once again in a conversation about what makes a book of poems “cohesive” – that is, what makes it a book-length experience, as distinct from a single-poem dip, a chapbook dive or, indeed, the narrative journey of a novel.'(Introduction)

'Death’s intrusion upon love is an old complaint. Philosophically, in Western Europe, it may have emerged as a problem in response to ideas of human limitation in Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura. This was early materialist thinking intended to prepare the late Roman mind for the finitude of life, belief, control and pleasure. The poetry of death-in-love is another matter. It is characterised by rage, disbelief and helplessness. It is ancient and myriad.' (Introduction)

'From Patrick White’s Voss to Tim Winton’s Breath, white, male Australian novelists have reproduced the hero character through sexualised conquests of other bodies and spaces.' (Introduction)

'Speaking recently in Adelaide, the expatriate Australian theorist Sneja Gunew proposed that nations are the museums of identity. I took her to mean that, regardless of our status as foreigner/visitor or citizen/member, we tour them—we observe national identity being curated and performed. But can we resign from identifying our self through nationality; can we inhabit another kind of space that is not even partly defined by it?'  (Introduction)

'As Troy Bramston writes, ‘By the end of 1992, [Paul] Keating had asked Australians to think about their history and their long-term future more than any other prime minister had. He was giving voice to a new nationalism for Australia at home and abroad.’ Politically speaking, this national ‘reorientation’ away from supposed cultural ties to Europe was partly reliant upon a strengthened relationship with North America as well as Asia (437); but a ‘new nationalism’ was being activated in the culture: what Anne Brewster terms a ‘new political imaginary’ that, ‘positions indigenous and non-indigenous people in a space of co-existence and co-habitation, where hierarchy is replaced with a sense of the coevalness of contemporary indigenous and non-indigenous modernisms’ (‘Brokering Cross-racial Feminism’ 218). A significant example of this is John Anderson’s long poem, the forest set out like the night. It was published in 1995, the year before Keating’s defeat as Prime Minister. Between the terms of Keating and Howard there emerged a constant public discourse about cultural identity. Lisa Bellear’s collection of poems, Dreaming in Urban Areas was published the year of Howard’s 1996 election win, and stands out as a voice of its moment. This essay considers these books together, against the background of their political era: not as historical artefacts, but rather, as works that try to act upon local and national culture through language. In light of growing commentary on, and contribution to decolonised poetics, this discussion suggests how that tension between the two books takes on a new, timely significance. ' (Publication abstract)