Cirrus@Austlit

'Shirley Walker (1927), retired Senior Lecturer in English from the University of New
England at Armidale, where she taught Australian Literature, decided to try her own
hand at writing a memoir. The result is Roundabout at Bangalow: An Intimate
Chronicle (2001), which is her account of growing up in the Northern Rivers area of New South Wales in Australia. The author has also published numerous critical articles on Australian Literature, commenting thoroughly on the work of Mary Gilmore (1865- 1962), Judith Wright (1915-2000) and Dorothy Hewett (1923-2002). Walker has also published The Ghost at the Wedding (2009) based on the life of Walker's mother in law, a woman whose life was largely shaped by war, and who, in 1918 near the end of WW1, married a returned soldier. This biography, which was awarded the Asher Literary Prize (2009) and the Nita B Kibble Award (2010), Australia's premier award for women's writing, has been described as a major work of Australian literature and a major contribution to Australian history. The present article focuses on Roundabout at Bangalow: An Intimate Chronicle, where Walker narrates the complicated and, sometimes, blurred resonances of her "half-a-lifetime" memoir. This work exemplifies how Walker is deeply concerned with the unreliability of memory and the way it can exaggerate grievances or distort past perceptions, unloosing itself from historical and geographical truth and adopting first and foremost a primal function in the formation of identities.' (Author's Introduction)

'This essay considers the work of Australian actor Kerry Walker (b. 1948) in the years 1977-1989. It focuses on Walker's acting style in the roles she played in a variety of works by Patrick White, her approach to acting and her enduring friendship with White. It seeks to document the specific qualities Walker brought to her performances in White's plays and to explain her distinctive understanding of White's drama.' (Author's abstract)

'Dorothy Hewett´s poetry follows a complex architecture, a structure which encompasses her personal beliefs and the guiding lights that consciously and unconsciously led her life, while it also draws and deploys core elements from the literary tradition of Western culture. The primary image that pervades her poems is the garden, which is either the place where many of her poems occur or a significant component in others. Hewett´s garden retains several of the characteristics of the primordial garden, such as innocence, abundance and placid solitude, but it also partakes of its Romantic nuances, which, after all, are the same as in Eden but enhanced by feeling and intensity. The garden as literary locus sets the pace of Hewett´s poetry in that it links myth-making with literary tradition, the pillars that sustain the body of her poetic reality. This triangle, myth, tradition and reality, incorporates the main topics that the Australian writer inscribes in her work, and, while each corner retains its thematic substance, it also reflects the other two, thus giving unity to the whole poetic process. As Bruce Bennett pointed out as early as 1995, "place, appropriately conceived, is a meeting ground of mental, emotional and physical states and as such is a suitable focus
for the literary imagination" (Bennett: 19).' (Author's introduction)