Cirrus@Austlit

'Tony Birch holds a rare place in Australian literature – a male writer focused on telling domestic and working class stories. His pages shimmer with the dirt of hard work, difficult choices, and  everyday of life. The joys in reading his stories are intimate and quiet: a secretive embrace, a hand reaching to another, a warm blanket, a story, a memory shared. As simple as his narratives may appear though, the lives of Birch’s characters are rich and their journeys complex. Aboriginality and the intergenerational impacts, including violence, of the colonial project surface in all his work, exploring questions of belonging, of inescapable difference, of class, of gender and of how racism, sexism, disrespect, judgement and exclusion shape people. Women & Children though, delivers a key change to his previous stories and novels. While no different in its motifs and themes, here there is a subtle and soft joy, a quiet heartfelt hope lifting through the journeys of the two children.' (Introduction)

'To read Song of the Crocodile is to immerse yourself in an unfolding relationship to place. You may not recognise it immediately but the profound connection to place shared by Simpson through this story is a slow build to love, yearning, recognition and respect for Country.  The novel is a confident and accomplished debut by Nardi Simpson, a Yuwaalaraay woman best known for her singing and song writing as a member of the Sydney band the Stiff Gins. It is a profound intergenerational Australian story of family and Country that deserves to be as celebrated and well-read as Tim Winton’s Cloudstreet.' (Introduction)

'In this lively and affectionate social history of place, Pam Menzies reveals Port Kembla to be both remarkable and ordinary – a driver of the nation as well as being, like so many places in Australia, on the receiving end of change and globalisation.' (Introduction)

'What to do as a white middle class writer attempting to write with anti-racist and decolonialist intent? Who to use as models in the classroom and how to teach the complexity of ethics and responsibility of telling stories that challenge and undermine the accepted narratives of this nation to a predominantly white middle class cohort? This paper argues that the examples exist, authors such as Kim Scott, Bruce Pascoe, Melissa Lucaschenko, Alexis Wright and Natalie Harkin amongst many others. It is a challenging process though, ethically and creatively, to use Indigenous writers as models of approaches to story when I am not Indigenous. How to discuss these challenges in a classroom? Through an examination of my semester long subject‘Writing across borders’, a subject with Kim Scott’s novel That Deadman Dance set as the spine of the course, this paper will highlight that one of the significant challenges lies in presenting this material as already in relationship to non-Indigenous students, who up until this class had seen a division between themselves and the literature they read, and Indigenous Australian writing, declaring: ‘They aren’t writing for me’ and ‘Their stories are not mine – I can’t relate.’ With the focus on Scott’s novel came the focus on race and on Indigenous and non-Indigenous relationships in Australia and the stories told of these relationships. To support me, I drew on Fiona Nicoll’s 2004 essay ‘Are you calling me racist’ throughout the semester as guide, mentor and backstop.'

Source: Abstract.

A few minutes before a man wakes up, his dead lover returns to him for one final reunion.