y separately published work icon Seven Versions of an Australian Badland single work   prose   travel   mystery  
Issue Details: First known date: 2002... 2002 Seven Versions of an Australian Badland
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AbstractHistoryArchive Description

'Part road movie, part memoir, part murder mystery, Seven Versions of an Australian Badland embarks on an enthralling journey through time, into the realms of myth and magic, narcissism and genocide.' (Back cover)

Notes

  • Epigraph: 'I sniff a fire burning without outlet, consuming acrid its own smoke.' - John Berryman - Homage to Mistress Bradstreet.

Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of

Works about this Work

Australia in Three Books Julianne Schultz , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: Meanjin , Winter vol. 82 no. 2 2023; Meanjin Online 2023;

— Review of Seven Versions of an Australian Badland Ross Gibson , 2002 single work prose ; Drawing the Global Colour Line : White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality Henry Reynolds , Marilyn Lake , 2008 single work non-fiction

'Reducing my Australia to just three books makes me feel like someone panning for gold in a fast-moving stream filled with the precious metal. If I stand still long enough and shake the pan hard enough, surely just three exceptional nuggets will be left. It’s fair to say that I have a privileged perspective.' (Introduction) 

Burn, Lucky Country, Burn! Ross Gibson , 2020 single work essay
— Appears in: Sydney Review of Books , March 2020;
Writing into or Drawing from? Self-manifestation through Movement in Contemporary Writing of Space Catherine Noske , 2017 single work criticism
— Appears in: TEXT Special Issue Website Series , October no. 41 2017;

'Contemporary Australian cultural studies has seen a move towards a multimodal awareness of space and place in writing – a speculative turn in both critical and creative work confronting the subject/object dichotomy as a limitation in place-making. Theorists such as Ross Gibson, Stephen Muecke and Michael Farrell offer beautiful conceptualisations of written spaces, drawing from several philosophical traditions, which might give context to contemporary creative practices. This writing regularly draws from movement as an integral feature of the practice discussed, with walking emerging in several approaches to re-envision the poet wanderer. But it is also possible to trace in this writing an act of selfmanifestation, a desire for the ‘doing-making’ of self to be inscribed within the multimodal spaces created. This paper will argue that this layering of self and space in the act of writing is both akin to and actively opposing the tradition of Romantic thought. While several features of the practices invoked might seem to draw from similar acts of immersion in landscape, the underlying trope of the Romantic poet’s divine communion is inverted in the speculative drive towards multimodal relation.

'Terror Nullius' : Contemporary Australian Frontier Fictions in the Classroom Russell West-Pavlov , 2016 single work criticism
— Appears in: Teaching Australian and New Zealand Literature 2016; (p. 67-76)

‘A fire hydrant on a street corner in Carlton, in inner-city Melbourne, carries an ephemeral stencilled graffito : ‘terror nullius.’ The graffito is a pun on the legal doctrine of terra nullius, Latin for ‘nobody’s land,’ which dictated that any territory found by a colonizing power could be occupied and claimed if it was deemed not to be inhabited by prior occupants. Typically it was deployed by the British, for example, in a number of rulings in the mid- to late – nineteenth century, (Reynolds, 'Frontier History' 4) to legitimize their colonial conquests around the so-called New World, in particular in Australia. Its hegemony as a legal fiction was ended by the Australian High Court’s historic Mabo ruling of 1992, which deemed that so-called native title, that is, Indigenous possession of Australia, had existed before and after British occupation and the declaration of sovereignty in 1788 (Butt, Eagleson, and Lane).’ (Introduction)

Seeing the Cosmos : Ross Gibson’s ‘Simultaneous Living Map’ Catherine Noske , 2015 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 15 no. 3 2015;
'In its reading of the journals of William Dawes, Ross Gibson’s 26 Views of the Starburst World offers a dynamic vision of the world. His entry into the landscape of Sydney Cove is characterised by and constructed according to the multiple ‘views’ of his title, each of which interrelate in various, shifting ways to coalesce into a narrative. The version of place which emerges is both strange and beautiful, challenging constructs of nation which depend on notions of locality and ‘rootedness’. Gibson’s text thus prompts questions of critical practice before place. What can be achieved in taking up a fragmented writing style? This paper investigates the manner in which Gibson reconstructs concepts of place and space in order to challenge contemporary understandings of the Australian nation. It questions whether or not a similar vision of place can be applied in other contexts, and examines the manner in which place comes to be doubled over in the act of reading.' (Publication abstract)
Badlands of the Soul Mark Svendsen , 2003 single work review
— Appears in: The Courier-Mail , 4 January 2003;

— Review of Seven Versions of an Australian Badland Ross Gibson , 2002 single work prose
Culture of Forgetting Lyndall Ryan , 2003 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , February no. 248 2003; (p. 18-19)

— Review of Seven Versions of an Australian Badland Ross Gibson , 2002 single work prose
Untitled Aviva Tuffield , 2003 single work review
— Appears in: The Times Literary Supplement , 21 February no. 5212 2003; (p. 31)

— Review of Seven Versions of an Australian Badland Ross Gibson , 2002 single work prose
Untitled Rachael Weaver , 2003 single work review
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 2 no. 2003; (p. 193-195)

— Review of Seven Versions of an Australian Badland Ross Gibson , 2002 single work prose
Australia in Three Books Julianne Schultz , 2023 single work review
— Appears in: Meanjin , Winter vol. 82 no. 2 2023; Meanjin Online 2023;

— Review of Seven Versions of an Australian Badland Ross Gibson , 2002 single work prose ; Drawing the Global Colour Line : White Men’s Countries and the Question of Racial Equality Henry Reynolds , Marilyn Lake , 2008 single work non-fiction

'Reducing my Australia to just three books makes me feel like someone panning for gold in a fast-moving stream filled with the precious metal. If I stand still long enough and shake the pan hard enough, surely just three exceptional nuggets will be left. It’s fair to say that I have a privileged perspective.' (Introduction) 

Among Historians Klaus Neumann , 2003 single work criticism
— Appears in: Cultural Studies Review , November vol. 9 no. 2 2003; (p. 177-191)
Extractive Realism Ross Gibson , 2009 single work criticism
— Appears in: Australian Humanities Review , November no. 47 2009;
'Here is a fine haiku by the Japanese poet Seishi, a twentieth-century master:

The signal pistol
Echoes on the hard surface
Of the swimming pool.
(Blyth 346)

And this tiny gem is by the contemporary Australian writer Robert Gray, matching Seishi for precision even though Gray's poem is fashioned from a much looser part of the world:

Torpid farmland afternoons.
A windmill stirs
as a bubble breaks in buttermilk.
(Gray 'Twenty Poems' 91)

Entire systems of reality are sketched quickly but exactly in these works. Shifts of scale spring from quickly conjured settings. Note all the perspectives offered in each poem, how in an instant your sensibility grabs several vantages on the scenes. Conjunctions of heat and smell and sound all shuttle across your cognitive frame, putting you here and there in a flash, giving you sudden and intense access to realities within the settings that are being witnessed. From the intimacy of your own witnessing body, you span out to encompass sharp details of large places-the hard acoustic slap in a swimming pool that's big enough for tournaments; the almost-imperceptible transpiration across flatland paddocks that need more water than raw nature supplies. And then in the next instant, as the meagre syllables slip along, memories pulse suddenly within you to bring you quickly back close to yourself via past time. All this occurs in a rhythm that folds the larger world and you together unstintingly. Appreciating Seishi's and Gray's crystalline miniatures, you know closeness as well as vastness in a retinue of glimmering moments. Emphasising definitive details of lived experience so exactly, both poems are realist.'

Racial Melancholia in Brian Castro’s Chinese-Australian Historical Fiction Hoa Pham , 2010 single work criticism
— Appears in: The Journal of Australian Writers and Writing , May no. 1 2010; (p. 65-72)
Lost Wagga Wagga Keri Glastonbury , 2014 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 14 no. 3 2014;
'This paper draws on Ross Gibson’s 7 Versions of an Australian Badland and braids together a number of narratives converging around Wagga’s Wiradjuri Reserve on the Murrumbidgee River including the murder of a school friend in the late 1980s, Wiradjuri and colonial history and my poetry sequence ‘Triggering Town’. While ficto-critical in style, it also deploys a geo-critical methodology: foregrounding spatial and geographical fields in terms of both narrative and literary inquiry.' (Publication abstract)
Seeing the Cosmos : Ross Gibson’s ‘Simultaneous Living Map’ Catherine Noske , 2015 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 15 no. 3 2015;
'In its reading of the journals of William Dawes, Ross Gibson’s 26 Views of the Starburst World offers a dynamic vision of the world. His entry into the landscape of Sydney Cove is characterised by and constructed according to the multiple ‘views’ of his title, each of which interrelate in various, shifting ways to coalesce into a narrative. The version of place which emerges is both strange and beautiful, challenging constructs of nation which depend on notions of locality and ‘rootedness’. Gibson’s text thus prompts questions of critical practice before place. What can be achieved in taking up a fragmented writing style? This paper investigates the manner in which Gibson reconstructs concepts of place and space in order to challenge contemporary understandings of the Australian nation. It questions whether or not a similar vision of place can be applied in other contexts, and examines the manner in which place comes to be doubled over in the act of reading.' (Publication abstract)
Last amended 10 Apr 2015 10:01:44
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