Cirrus@Austlit

'Sometimes a novel emerges in a culture that touches the nerve of its times even though it is set a generation or so earlier. Dickens's Bleak House is a novel of this kind. The institutions of law remain forever colored by Dickens's satiric observations in this novel. Christopher Koch is not a satirist, but his novel Highways to a War (1995) remains the most memorable of the spate of novels that explored Australia's military involvement in the wars in Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1960s and 70s. Koch's latest novel, The Memory Room (2007), set in China and Australia in the early 1980s, has a similar impact and again recalls events some twenty-five years earlier, with a focus on the profession of secret intelligence.' (p. 109)

'Gossip in Melbourne author Helen Garner's writing can be viewed as that which is used in attempts to seal friendships, close the spaces and erase the differences that divide 'the self from the space of the other' (Nead 6). This discussion will consider how language constructs gendered living and speaking spaces and how Garner's concentration on forms of daily domestic exchange celebrates that which Whitlock refers to as 'exalted gossip over, among other things, self-centered masculine discourse.' (p. 115)

'In this paper I am reading Jindabyne as a significant place and its sustained filmic representation in Ray Lawrence's Jindabyne (2006) in order to consider how we might begin to understand Australianness as a kind of haunted subjectivity but as\lso as one that might be reframed within or by a politics of becoming. Just as Thrift calls up a trope of water on land in his 'reservoir of meanings,' so too does Lawrence's film consider the symbolic meanings and resultse that come of Australian water on/and Australian land.' (p. 141)