Unit Suitable For
AC: Year 11 (Literature Unit 2)
Themes
Indigenous Australians, life and death, natural world/environmentalism, poetry, regional Australia, the past
General Capabilities
Critical and creative thinking, Ethical understanding, Information and communication technology, Intercultural understanding, Literacy, Personal and social
Cross-curriculum Priorities
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, Sustainability
'This paper investigates the affective labour done by, specifically, native species images in Australian poetry, using Judith Wright's bird poems, and various poems about kangaroos as example. It uses the anthropological term, "deep hanging out", borrowed from an article about fashion models, to extend the idea of affective labour, and to measure poems' attentions to birds and animals, and their relation to iconising as the work of nationalism. It is concerned with cultural capital, and Canberra, and the human empire.' (Publication abstract)
'Since the middle of the twentieth century, the phenomenon of public apology has become increasingly prevalent and visible, enacted in contexts ranging from the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission to the Australian government’s apology to the Stolen Generation, to the iconic genuflection of Willy Brandt before the Warsaw Ghetto Monument. While research surrounding public apology (particularly in the context of work on trauma, memory and reconciliation) has also become increasing prevalent, literary representations of public apology remain under-researched. Works like J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace (1999) and Gail Jones’ Sorry (2007) present something of a scholarly conundrum. In the final historical and cultural assessment of public apologies, how are imaginative representations of apologies to be understood? Do they participate in the apologising process, or do they simply describe it? What implications does a judgement either way hold for scholarship on the larger relations between art and civic life? This paper finds a way into some of these large questions by considering the specific case of Judith Wright and the forms of literary redress she made to Indigenous Australians. ' (Introduction)
Sue King-Smith says: 'There are three main spectres in Wright's poetry that this article addresses. The first relates to the loss and separation Wright experienced when she became aware of the history of the land she had felt a profound sense of identification with since early childhood ... The second spectre relates to the traces of Aboriginal massacres and dispossessions. And the third is the spectre of the indigenous landscape that existed prior to British occupation, with a substantial number of indigenous species of flora and fauna now extinct.
'This article will argue that these spectres are intimately linked in Wright's writing and that her poetic and private relationships with the Australian landscape are constantly mediated by the need to acknowledge these ghosts.' (pp.117-118)
The God-Shaped Hole : Responding to the Good News in Australia
Adelaide
:
ATF Press
,
2008
Z1533434
2008
selected work
criticism
This book brings together a selection of Veronica Brady's critical addresses arguing that there are novels and poems that bear witness to the mystery of 'God' or an 'Other' who speaks through others.
