Cirrus@Austlit

"In this essay I hope to track the similarities and differences between two cultural revivals at two very different moments in history, and to trace the ways in which the earlier Irish Revival might have some lessons for the latter, and to demonstrate that a postcolonial sea-change makes the process a quite different one, despite some superficial similarities" (18).

Examines Trollope's concept and use of the words 'squatter' and 'gentleman' in the context of Australian colonial settlement.

The aims of this essay are "to give some idea of Boldrewood's deeply perceptive insights into the evolving social history associated with Australian gold mining and into the contribution of the international contingents amongs miners to nineteenth century Australian development, recording his views in novels which had a very wide readership in the English-speaking world" and to explore "various related aspects of the evolving Australian character and stock, particularly on the goldfields of the nation". Argues that Browne/Boldrewood was right "to regard gold mining and miners as very substantial building materials for the new and even then multicultural nation" (57).

Examines the nature of Mary Gilmore's faith and beliefs. Strauss argues that Gilmore "had faith in life itself as an active principle in the universe; she believed positively, if by no means uncritically, in the power of human action to make the world a better place; she believed that women must be enabled to play their role in such action; and she believed in the power of words to inspire such action" (64).

This essay discusses Dorothy Porter's The Monkey's Mask in the light of some critical reviews of the verse novel, particularly that of Fiona Moorhead who had complained that it didn't really meet the criteria of the conventional genre of detective novels. Plunkett argues that at the heart of the novel, and the complaints against it, is the idea of a 'poetics of excision', a focus on what the text doesn't do, 'its silences and refusals'.

McCallum draws attention to a number of neglected plays of the 1920s-1950s in the Howard Collection and discusses the reasons why they were neglected unlike, for instance, the plays of Louis Esson. He argues that many of the best Campbell Howard plays didn't fit into the standard history of Australian drama. However, many skillful and professional playwrights whose scripts Howard collected were trying to write for the commercial theatre, and, a nationalist theatre lacking, wrote genre plays, "mostly realistic melodramas, thrillers and drawing room comedies" - the truly neglected Australian plays. Focussing on the sub-genres of bush realist melodrama, station dramas, family sagas, and country town comedies and dramas, McCallum's essay looks at a number of these plays, and at the interaction between genre and the goals of the nationalists.

Compares the representations of Australians and Australian life and ethos in Lawler's and Nowra's plays.

Reads comparatively, and against each other, the autobiographies of Conway and Walker, 'approximate contemporaries, career academics ... whose autobiographies explore issues relating to family, secondary and university education, female fulfilment and "liberation", local and national culture, and urban and rural experience' (120).

Explores the notion of wholeness - in individual and national terms - in Malouf's novel.

Explores the discrepancies between Astley's extra-fictional positive comments about country towns in Queensland and her representation of country-town culture in some of her novels, particularly Drylands, as ugly, brutal and barely literate. Hassall argues that this contradiction could be another paradoxical version of the 'Sydney or the Bush' topos in Australian literature and culture.

Walker's article discusses and compares three women's narrative, all focussing on gardens and orchards as signifiers of feminie regeneration. With their mixture of genres and sources, the texts are seen as examples of a movement in fiction towards complexity, towards 'the layering of history, essay, autobiography, folk-tale and original story-telling into dense and complicated narratives' (161), where fact and fiction are shown to be related and dependent upon one another, and are woven into a pattern which gives a new meaning to the concept of intertextuality.

This essay reviews and discusses seven Australian novels published in 2000 and 2001 which all focus on 'travelling heroines'. Trying to explore what these novels tell us about the current state of Australian fiction, Webby sees a trend to avoid contemporary settings and topics and thus a confrontation with current political and social issues such as discrimination and racism. She observes a move from the nineteenth to the twentieth century as 'the favoured domain for serious Australian historical fiction', and a trend to return to essentially nineteenth-century themes and structures.

The object of this article is 'to examine the possibility of a revival of tragedy manifested in a certain sector of contemporary writing': books that are the product fo the AIDS epidemic. After a general introductory section on tragedy and humanism, it extensively discusses Conigrave's autobiography Holding the Man (1995) under the aspect of the concept of tragedy.