'The October 9, 2000 edition of the Australian News magazine the Bulletin features a special report, entitled 'The Gathering Storm,' which details predictions of how catastrophic, climate-change driven upheavals across Asia could see the inundation of Australia's vulnerable north with environmental refugees. Australian Federal Police Commissioner Mick Keelty foresees that lack of rain, rising sea levels, pandemic disease, and failing crops may lead to vast movements of populations a people 'in their millions' could begin to look for land and they'll cross oceans and borders to do it.'
'In the fourteenth century, cartographers depicting Terra Australis, the imagined but as yet unconfirmed southern continent, placed fearsome mythical creatures in the 'unknown spaces' on their maps. Dragons, gargoyles, and giant sea serpents both guarded and occupied the as-yet-undefined spaces of the Antipodes.'
'In contemporary Australia's dominant, non-indigenous culture, the dragons and gargoyles, and even, ostensibly, terra nullius itself, now repealed, are gone, yet ghosts of their presence and purpose remain. White Australians still populate the spaces beyond their immediate knowledge with mythical presences and imbue them with qualities of fear and menace. This article explores the role of spaces of fear in one particular white Australian narrative trope, the white-vanishing tales. This is the paradigm of recurring stories in non-indigenous Australian textuality about disappearing whites (lost children, missing explorers, vanishing tramps and drovers, etc.)'
'This essay examines the effects of early to mid twentieth-century government policies of 'protection' and assimilation on indigenous Australian lives. It focuses on childhood fears as recounted by Baarkanji memoirist Evelyn Crawford in her transcribed oral history, Over My Tracks, and on 'national' fears as represented in public spheres.'
'The terrorist has become a familiar figure and terrorism a common referent in recent Australian writing. I intend to explore a handful of Australian novels published, like [Janet Turner] Hospital's work , since 2001 : A.L. McCann's Subtopia (2005), Linda Jaivin's The Infernal Optimist (2006), Richard Flanagan's The Unknown Terrorist (2006), and Andrew McGahan's Underground (2006). All of these novels entered a world attuned to the destructive potential of the terrorist and wary of the terrorist desire to wreak and skill at wreaking havoc.'
