Cirrus@Austlit

'Like fellow South Australian resident J.M. Coetzee, Peter Goldsworthy has, in a number of his works, sought to raise crucial ethical issues for a predominantly post-Christian Western world where problems posed by technologies and their products precipitate new moral, ethical and psychological dilemmas. It is increasingly clear that our current legal frameworks and traditional moral guides are inadequate in dealing with developments over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Both John Coetzee and Peter Goldsworthy then, have used fiction to raise these issues, and reaching imaginatively 'outside the box,' drawn our attention to the directions in which we might seek at least partial solutions.'

'In Australian Literature (1940), E. Morris Miller says that John Boyle O'Reilly was the 'first poet associated with Western Australia'. He was in Western Australia for two years in the late 1860s. However, if we allow that there was a tradition of publishing local verse from the inception of the newspaper/journal press in the colony (1892 on), this can be seen as merely a statement about external recognition and publication - that is, recognition outside the colony. I would argue that even in terms of that external recognition, for example there were other poets from the colony who were associated with Western Australia by those outside the colony.'

'Bats have been a greater source of horror and mystery in literature than perhaps any other living creature. The transmogrifying agent between human beings and bloodsucking servants of the devil, bats are usually represented as the animal which terrifies heroines. They are portrayed as demonic swarms which become enmeshed in a heroine's hair as she teeters on the edge of a precipice. Bats have gained an unenviable reputation which, until very recently, has been completely undeserved.'