Cirrus@Austlit

For years, Leila Whittaker has been the mediator in her family. She smoothes ruffled
feathers between her sons; endures the volatile moods of their father, the acclaimed
Australian artist Ken Black; and even swallows the bitter pill of Ken’s endless affairs. All
this, for the quiet hum of creative freedom her marriage provides. Or so she tells herself.

When Ken dies, leaving his artist’s estate to their two sons, and the pointed amount of
sixty-nine thousand dollars to his muse, Anita, Leila decides she’s had enough. It’s time to seek some peace (and pleasure) of her own ...

Diving, Falling is an elegant, exhilarating journey through grief, betrayal, and the
intoxicating rediscovery of joy. Ripe with wickedly wry observations, unashamedly bold and sexy, it examines the calculations and sacrifices women make to keep the peace, escape their pasts, and find the agency to pursue their own passions.  (Publication summary)

'A novel exploring a father-son relationship and Iranian diasporic poetry.'

'The first weekly instalment of the Australian Journal, published on 2 September 1865, declared its intention to ‘reflect the Literature, Art, and Science of Australia’. Issued from Melbourne, its inaugural editorial declared that the journal would engage the ‘ablest Colonial pens of the day’, in an ambitious venture that sought to ‘please everybody’. The promise was to ‘record the phases of Colonial literature; to direct attention to the triumphs of art; and to explain the most recent efforts of mechanical genius’ (‘To Our Readers’). Guided by this statement’s fusion of different modes of representation and knowledge, its engagement with technological advancement, and its emphasis on place, my purpose here is to explore how a specifically Australian version of sensation was crafted in the serial fiction and scientific non-fiction published in the early years of the Australian Journal. This essay identifies the Australian Journal as a key player in the multiple and multi-directional migrations of text, images and ideas in the Victorian era. The movement of English literature into other Anglophone places in the nineteenth century created a community of connected, if remote, readers who participated in a global network of print as producers, consumers, and agents of circulation. This migration was of literary form, genre, convention, and technique as much as it was of the printed object. Although the material published was often of colonial origin, the Australian Journal, modelled as it was on the London Journal, engaged in the transportation of British literary platforms, genre, and styles, especially sensation, from the centre of Empire to the colonies.'

Source: Abstract.

'This special issue tracks the ways in which Victorian literary texts and ideas were transformed by their arrival and reception in the Australasian colonies and then re-transmitted around the trade lines of Empire. The literary migration outlined here involved the marketplace and the production of cultural meaning; the transportation and importation of printed artefacts and the re-location, and re-working, of ideas and approaches. The articles in this issue explore how the colonial arrivals and departures of textual traffic in the Victorian marketplace involved complex cultural and literary exchanges and re-negotiations of story, character, genre and form.'

Source: Abstract.

Susan K. Martin and Kylie Mirmohamadi look at a sub-genre of popular writing that spanned the globe from London to Melbourne