Cirrus@Austlit

Dennis Haskell discusses depictions of moral relativism in Australian literature. He cites various examples including the characters of Elizabeth Costello (in Elizabeth Costello) and Ellen Roxburgh (in A Fringe of Leaves).

Basing her analysis on 'theories put forward by Homi Bhabha, William E. Cross and Robert Young among others', Oliete compares Sally Morgan's My Place with Roberta Sykes's Snake Dreaming trilogy 'in order to demonstrate that these two books ... present different perspectives on the same topic: the search of a place in a post-colonial society by hybrid women who strive to get out of the Australian fringe'.

Olmedilla argues that 'Australian literature is a juxtaposition of former influences and daily rituals, they create a collective soul state which is tributary to a place, symbolic or real and to it pays homage to [sic]'.

Susan Cowan addresses the work of three Australian writers 'who converged on India where they lived and wrote long before the hippy trial of the 70s'. Cowan chooses to focus on the 'military angle' due to her 'personal exposure to the military environment'.

Kodhandaraman argues that the writings of Aboriginal authors and historians exposes 'the contradictions inherent in the white discourse of colonization'.

Taking a trajectory through Australian poetry from the writing of Hope, Wright and Dobson to the work of Aboriginal poets, Mathur's students come to appreciate Australian literature as not simply writing by Australians about Australia, but as 'voicing universal, human concerns - penned by people who happen to be Australian'.

Gupta and Kahlon argue that instead of 'offsetting [Oscar and Lucinda] in the larger context of the colonization of Australia, Carey inverts this relationship and makes the event of colonization just another in the many incidents that take up a personal history of the narrator'.

Patra argues that 'Australian identity means many identities and has attained a new kind of sophistication and broad tolerance which thousands of years of world history have so far seldom managed to achieve'.

'The focus of this paper is the role of family in Aboriginal Women's Writing ... I am interested in how the family is the site of story telling, an important means by which Aboriginality is constructed and transmitted.'

Sharma argues that the poetry of Les Murray 'seems to poetically enact the process of the realization of Kaivalya, which is isolation - the Onlyness. This isolation, however, quite paradoxially, also involves integrations and stands for an integrated being and in Murray's poetics for the poetry as "Wholespeak"'.