Cirrus@Austlit

'The circus is back in town. Senate Estimates hearings on Thursday 25 October, 2018, revealed that Simon Birmingham, in his term as Minister for Education, personally vetoed over $4 million worth of public funding reserved for competitively tendered research projects. These projects had been recommended for funding approval by the Australian Research Council (ARC) after progressing through one of the most rigorous peer review processes in the world. In keeping with previous statistics, the approval rate for applications in the 2017–18 funding period was below 20%.5 The ministerial rejection of these grants was not made public until the Senate Estimates session in question, and the ARC representatives present for Senate Estimates—Chief Executive Officer Sue Thomas and Executive General Officer Leanne Harvey—repeatedly stated that the “minister is the decision-maker,” and that they were never provided with any reasons for his decision to decline the funding.6 Two factors are particularly disheartening in this whole affair: firstly, each vetoed project was within the already chronically underfunded field of the humanities, with no other fields of research being similarly impacted; secondly, these rejections were largely targeted at early-career researchers, with the termination of three Discovery Early Career Researcher Awards (totalling $1,057,828) and two Future Fellowships (totalling $1,691,116). Liberal Senator James Paterson immediately leapt to the defence of his government’s decision: “I just want to take the opportunity for placing on the record my appreciation to [the minister] for his careful stewardship of taxpayer dollars.”' (Editorial introduction)

WITH this special volume of Philament, edited by Blythe Worthy and myself, the journal moves into a new stage of its life. For our last published volume, number 22, “Precarity,” we decided to print a small number of physical copies, largely to satisfy our own curiosities about the cost of the printing process, but also to see whether the aesthetic value of these digital pages, lovingly typeset as they are, would carry over to the parchment. Happy with the results of our experiment, we have decided that we shall this time print a few more copies than the last time, an opportunity made possible thanks to Blythe Worthy’s strong advocacy of the journal and the resultant support we have received from the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre (SSSHARC).' (Chris Rudge : Editorial Note)

'This issue of Philament, our twenty-second, embraces a range of poets, as well as writers, essayists, and reviewers. Adam Hulbert’s study of Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock draws attention to the many sonic figurations in Lindsay’s novel, offering a fresh reading of the precarious fates of the protagonists in this “preeminent antipodean weird tale.” Blythe Worthy’s study of Rachel Kushner’s 2013 novel The Flamethrowers offers a timely problematisation of contemporary identity politics, illuminating new ways in which the novel “exposes feminism’s distinctive markings of precarity.” And Aleksandr Andreas Wansbrough’s essay on Lars von Trier’s Melancholia allows us to see the film’s prologue as an example of avant-garde video art. Critics will have already perceived the way in which Melancholia allegorises Earth’s cosmic precarity, revealing this planet’s vulnerability in a universe filled with other celestial bodies, all of them potential collision threats. However, Wansbrough’s essay also shows us how von Trier’s film makes genre and aesthetic categories equally precarious—elements ever threatening to collide. The issue’s short stories—Angelina Koseva’s “The Red Room” and Sian Pain’s “Wildcat”—offer intensive glimpses at precarious milieux in the contemporary cityscape, while varied works of poetry, by Philip Porter, Mona Zahra Attamimi, and Dimitra Harvey, chart their slightly more abstract courses toward this issue’s theme. As always, it is hoped that this issue encourages more scholarship on its theme, and prompts postgraduates in particular to submit to Philament’s future issues.' (From : Facing Precarity)