Cirrus@Austlit

The article examines Astley's early satirical novels, asking the question, what do these early satires on gender relations share with those of her male contemporaries, and where do they differ? Are her suburbs and small towns vehicles for satire and ironies that blame women for the excesses and failures of modernity? Arguing that post-war modernism was a strongly masculinist culture which saw art defined by its distance to everyday life, popular values and middle-class consumerism, Sheridan concludes: 'To the extent that she shared this dominant masculinist aesthetic of the 1950s and 1960s, Astley's satirical stance involved her, inevitably, in a modernist rejection of this feminine modernity as innately trivial, distracting and undermining serious aesthetic, intellectual and spiritual values' (270).

The article offers 'a Lacanian analysis of the function of Woman in Murnane's The Plains, a novel which is itself preoccupied with the use made of the image of Woman in the reproduction of prevailing national fantasies' (273).

The article concentrates on Turner's allegorical portrayal of the Australian nation as a domestic space: garden, or house, or both, particularly in her novel The Ungardeners. 'Turner's later fiction, although interested in modernity and social change, retains the garden as an emblematic space, and uses it to map the impact of modernity and the shift in national allegiances from England to the United States' (285). In her earlier fiction the garden tends to be represented as a private, feminine space and is used to examine the possibilities and limitations for the female national subject. Martin argues that in The Ungardeners elements of this gendering remain but are used to a more generalised examination of national space and the place of the modern nation.

Having played a part as a publisher's reader in the Koolmatrie affair himself, Morrissey examines this literary hoax from a variety of perspectives relating to its origins, development, implications and consequences, and produces some new information and facts. Among other aspects he suggests that My Own Sweet Time was the work, either jointly or individually, of two white men, John Bayley and Leon Carmen.