Trauma

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Works About this Award

Kim Scott’s Fiction within Western Australian Life-Writing : Voicing the Violence of Removal and Displacement Cornelis Martin Renes , 2013 single work criticism
— Appears in: Coolabah , no. 10 2013; 'It is nowadays evident that the West's civilising, eugenic zeal have had a devastating impact on all aspects of the Indigenous-Australian community tissue, not least the lasting trauma of the Stolen Generations. The latter was the result of the institutionalisation, adoption, fostering, virtual slavery and sexual abuse of thousands of mixed-descent children, who were separated at great physical and emotional distances from their Indigenous kin, often never to see them again. The object of State and Federal policies of removal and mainstream absorption and assimilation between 1930 and 1970, these lost children only saw their plight officially recognised in 1997, when the Bringing Them Home report was published by the Federal government. The victims of forced separation and migration, they have suffered serious trans-generational problems of adaptation and alienation in Australian society, which have been not only documented from the outside in the aforementioned report but also given shape from the inside of and to Indigenous-Australian literature over the last three decades. The following addresses four Indigenous Western-Australian writers within the context of the Stolen Generations, and deals particularly with the semi-biographical fiction by the Nyoongar author Kim Scott, which shows how a very liminal hybrid identity can be firmly written in place yet. Un-writing past policies of physical and 'epistemic' violence on the Indigenous Australian population, his fiction addresses a way of approaching Australianness from an Indigenous perspective as inclusive, embracing transculturality within the nation-space.' (Author's abstract)
Merlinda Bobis’s The Solemn Lantern Maker: The Ethics of Traumatic Cross-Cultural Encounters M. Dolores Herrero , 2013 single work criticism
— Appears in: Coolabah , no. 10 2013; 'Merlinda Bobis's second novel is an interesting combination of opposites: of the powerless and the powerful, the holy and the profane, the magical and the seedy, Third-World Asian poverty and white Western affluence. The Solemn Lantern Maker is a traumatized mute 10-year-old boy who lives with his crippled mother in the slums of Manila. One day, when trying to sell his colourful wares, he becomes involved in the life of a grieved American tourist who is caught up in a murder of a controversial journalist. In this post-9/11 climate, this event will soon be wrongly interpreted as a terrorist conspiracy. My paper will rely on some of the most relevant assumptions put forward by ethical criticism and trauma studies to show that Bobis's novel succeeds in illustrating how the powerful world of international politics can inadvertently impinge on the small world of an insignificant Third-World child, and how the love and care that this child offers to an unknown distressed westerner eventually manages to play the miracle of transforming the latter's life, thus making it clear that Bobis's allegory of traumatic cross-cultural encounters testifies to the power of the (un)common to render the invisible visible, and of the unselfish circulation of affect to effect unexpected changes in an apparently indifferent globalized world.' (Author's abstract)
Invitation to the Voyage : Reading Gail Jones' Five Bells Robert Dixon , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: JASAL , vol. 12 no. 3 2012; 'In this article, the first on Five Bells, I outline several contexts that will be foundational for subsequent readings of the novel. They include its relationship to Kenneth Slessor's poem; Jones' interest in the French Situationist International and their theories of urbanism and psychogeography; the influence of Woolf's Mrs Dalloway, trauma studies and the trauma novel; and another cluster of themes associated with Pastnernak's Doctor Zhivago, World Literature, cosmopolitanism and global translation.' (Author's abstract)
He Told Me He was a Kind of Doctor i "I knew that I should have known better, but I played along", Amelia Walker , 2012 single work poetry
— Appears in: Unusual Work , no. 13 2012;
Nativism and the Interlocutor John Mateer , 2012 single work criticism
— Appears in: Cordite Poetry Review , 1 November no. 40.0 2012;
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