'Creative writing in Australian Spanish-language newspapers has to date taken many forms, from short stories to poems, from memoirs to crónicas. Crónicas are writings that comment on the happenings of daily life, social habits and the concerns of communities, at times employing humour and satire while at others adopting a more sombre tone. Crónicas are a significant genre because they serve the reading community by touching on many of the themes that resonate with the migrant experience.
'While Spanish-language crónicas first appeared in Australian newspapers in the 1970s, their origins in this country were established much earlier by a Spanish migrant from Catalonia, Salvador Torrents. Torrents fled persecution as a result of his involvement in anarchist politics and arrived in Australia in 1916, working in the sugar cane fields near Innisfail, North Queensland. Up until his death in 1952 he wrote profusely in a variety of genres, including the crónica, and his work was published in European and North American newspapers. This study examines the way in which Torrents’ writings on politics, family life, social customs and gender relations informed an international audience, projecting the migrant’s perspective of an Australian experience to a worldwide readership.' (Publication abstract)
'‘I don’t belong to generation green,’ announces Jill Jones in her poem ‘Leaving It To the Sky’ (Dark Bright Doors, 2010); and in her blog Ruby Street she has voiced her discomfort with having her work seen as embodying ‘a form of comfortable ecopoetic with some fancy philosophic or metaphysical flourishes’. In ‘Leaving It To the Sky’, her narrator writes instead of an equivocal relationship to a particular city, memories of a suburban working-class childhood, and the need to avoid being allocated to any school of thinking, any ‘overarching narrative’, at all. The poem is not primarily concerned with landscape or the natural world, but opens itself to difference and contradiction, leaps of association, a refusal to be disciplined into membership of an accepted group of concerned writers.
'This paper will consider how Jill Jones tackles the ecopoetic as process rather than category. Using the work of Walter Benjamin and Timothy Morton, I argue that the ecopoetic in this sense may have little to do with a traditional sense of ‘nature’ – which has been absorbed, in Joan Retallack’s words, ‘into literary tropes and musings fed by chronically ego-bound, short-sighted human desires’. Instead, as this paper will demonstrate, Jones often reaches out to otherness, incorporating the languages of popular culture, journalism, politics, technology and the corporate: an experiment in contemporary consciousness, the human and the non-human inextricably entwined.' (Publication abstract)
