Cirrus@Austlit

Genoni discusses Australian novels, published largely in the late 1990s, that feature 'a character who is a cameraman or woman, sometimes professional, sometimes amateur, but to whom the world is framed, filtered and focused through the lens, the viewfinder, and the zoom.' He concludes, 'if we accept that space is produced by discursive practices, then we must question whether the text that is embedded in over 150 years of photgraphic production has not shaped an imagination that encounters space in terms of time as well as, or perhaps rather than, place.'

Gaile begins by highlighting works published in the 1990s and the early 21st century that have resulted in putting 'Irishness back onto the public and academic agenda' in Australia. He then focuses on one of the main themes of Christopher Koch's Out of Ireland, 'the all-encompassing duality motif'. Gaile examines Koch's treatment of English-Irish relations in Australia and analyses how Koch 'handles the controversy between these two opposing forces in an antipodean context' with particular emphasis on the 'hell vs. paradise' opposition depicted through the novel's Tasmanian setting.

Ahlstrom examines the interplay between paintings and the writing of David Brookes and Sue Woolfe.

McNeer compares elements of similarity in Murray Bail's Eucalyptus and William Shakespeare's The Tempest. McNeer particularly examines fables, fairy tales and mythic stories that may have been available to Shakespeare and, derivatively, influenced Bail. The characters of Miranda in The Tempest and Ellen in Eucalyptus are compared as are their respective fathers, Prospero and Holland.

McNeer concludes with a quotation from G. Wilson Knight's The Crown of Life: Essays in Interpretation of Shakespeare's Final Plays (1965): 'It is, perhaps, inevitable that Shakespeare, so saturated with the spirit of his land, should, in such a summation of that work in The Tempest, have outlined, among much else, a myth of the national soul' (p.255). This parting comment, says McNeer, 'may provide the most profound connection of all between William Shakespeare and Murray Bail'.