Cirrus@Austlit

'What have T. S. Eliot and the northern coast of Western Australia in common? Answer, the Somerset village of East Coker. Both William Dampier, the buccaneer who was the first Englishman to set foot on Australian soil (in 1688), and Eliot’s forebears came from East Coker.'  (Introduction)

'The criticism of Australian literature is in a perilous state right now.

'Publishers aren’t willing to keep the classics in print, let alone publish commentaries on them. Theory and Cultural Studies have taken a lot of the discipline’s energy, and changes to the nature of research funding have drastically reduced academic involvement in the public discussion of Australian literature. Since the Demidenko affair, when the association of Australian literature critics gave its highest award to a novel later challenged for its plagiarism and anti-Semitism, the critics themselves seem to have adopted a defensive posture, secure within academic discourse and suspicious of public debate.' (Introduction)

'It was Arthur Phillip (ironically the namesake of an early colonist) who, in the 1950 summer issue of the Australian magazine Meanjin, coined the phrase “cultural cringe”. He took as his exemplum a radio programme in which the work of a foreign composer was played along with an Australian composition; listeners were supposed to try to guess which was which, and were supposed to fail, demonstrating, in Phillip’s sardonic words, that “the local lad proves to be no worse than the foreigner. This unexpected discovery is intended to inspire a nice show of patriotic satisfaction . . . .” Phillip’s essay has been, deservedly, influential; it picks out an attitude which, in its different forms, once underwrote many of the schools of Australian poetry in the mid- to…'  (Introduction)

'Stephen Muecke’s No Road (bitumen all the way) is an ambitious work that blends travel, ethnography and cultural theory. Using the Aboriginal nexus between space, story and wandering (an area Bruce Chatwin explored in The Songlines), Muecke heads into the vast area of north-western Australia to document a personal journey, with no particular destination. He writes about this region and its Aboriginal communities without resorting to representing both landscape and people as a picturesque other (Chatwin’s weakness, according to Muecke, is his European, imperial aesthetic sense): “Communities lie on the tracks and byways of experience (the No Road of his title), not on the national highways of myth and ideology (the bitumen).” Muecke, in the tradition of Deleuze, conceives of writing as an endless journey, always keeping ideas…' (Introduction)

'Sir Paul Hasluck missed out on being Australian Prime Minister by a handful of party-room votes in 1968. Despite his elevation to the Governor-Generalship the next year, Hasluck never quite forgave his colleagues for the slight. He was the wrong man to have offended.'  (Introduction)

'These lower-deck reminiscences by John Nicol of life at sea in the late eighteenth century were written down and published in 1822 by John Howell, a Scottish bookbinder and inventor. How much of the language of the book is Nicol’s, and how much that of his kindly amanuensis, is impossible to tell; but there is no reason to doubt the general authenticity of the memoir. Nicol’s twenty-five years afloat were remarkable for their variety. He saw action in the War of American Independence; served in the Greenland whale fishery; was nursed back to life by a slave in the West Indies; marvelled at the customs of the Chinese. He was on the first ship into Hawaii after the death of Captain Cook at Kealakakua Bay, seven years earlier;…' (Introduction)

'The life and work of Bernard Smith are truly remarkable. He is to Australia, perhaps, what the historian W. H. Prescott was to America, a figure of the periphery who brought such news to the centre as it had never heard before.' (Introduction)

'I was at the post office with my Mum and Auntie (and cousin). They put us in the police ute and said they were taking us to Broome. They put the mums in there as well. But when we’d gone (about ten miles) they stopped, and threw the mothers out of the car. We jumped on our mothers’ backs, crying, trying not to be left behind. But the policemen pulled us off and threw us back in the car.' (Introduction)

'In December 1972, Gough Whitlam led the Australian Labor Party to power after twenty-three years of unbroken conservative rule. On November 11, 1975, the Governor-General of Australia, Sir John Kerr, dismissed him. Within the Westminster system, this was the first time since 1783 that the Crown or its representative had dismissed a government which had not broken the law and which commanded a majority in the lower house of the parliament.'  (Introduction)