Cirrus@Austlit

'On Anzac Day 2005 John Howard proclaimed that Anzac soldiers had 'bequeathed Australia a lasting sense of national identity'. Howard's speeches and other efforts to revitalise Anzac Day have generated questions about his vision of the Australian nation...

Brenda Walker's award winning fourth novel The Wing of Night entered this debate about the control and uses of the Anzac image in 2005, the year that marked the 90th anniversary of the Anzac landing at Gallipoli. By honouring and remembering a variety of men and women that Howard's version of the Anzac legend ignores, Walker challenges a limited, gendered image of the nation.' (p. 1)

'Nations are sustained by nationalism, which is built on the narratives that are retold in official histories, national literatures, media representations, invented traditions and foundational myths. In the past fifteen years or so, Australian literature and Australia's history of nation formation have found themselves between a rock and hard place. Both have been (and still are) threatened and destabilised by, amongst other things, the forces of globalisation...' (p. 14)

'Born in Cloncurry, Queensland and affiliated with the Waanji people of the highlands of the southern Gulf of Carpentaria, Austral¬ian author Alexis Wright wrote her debut novel Plains of Promise in 1997. Wright deals with is¬sues such as the brutal assimilation of Aboriginal people at St. Dominic’s Mission and their struggles to maintain connection with their communities, families and homelands. Since the settlers sepa¬rated Aboriginal family members and interfered in their relations with the land and each other, these relations had to be reinvented. Aborigi¬nal characters make use of the land and natural world to communicate to each other and respond to the violence of colonisation.' (p. 29)

This paper explores the use of sustained second-person narrative in G. M. Glaskin's No End to the Way and Peter Kocan's The Treatment.

'This essay will discuss the operation of major anthologies of Australian literature as re-enforcers of colonial imperialist ideals, particularly through the specific arrangement of texts. In these anthologies, indigenous voices and images are placed in provocative positions that work to maintain a sense of static identity or function in Australia. This study looks specifically at popular anthologies of Australian literature published by major presses after the dissolution of the White Australia Policy.' (p. 59)