Australian literature and writers
Articles
- Good Readers and Good Citizens : Literature, Media and the Nation
In recent decades nationalism has sometimes been classed in the same category of immoral behaviours as racism and sexism. Reading from the historical and literary…
1 October 1999 - Interview with Hal Porter
Mary Lord interviews Hal Porter about his career, approach to writing, critical reception and literary influences.
1 May 1978 - Literary Composition on Board a Convict Ship : The ‘Pestonjee Bomanjee Journal’
The exotically named convict ship the 'Pestonjee Bomanjee' sailed from Plymouth on the 18 April 1852, with 291 transportees, 30 pensioners as guards 24 women…
1 October 1969 - Grant Watson and the Aborigine: A Tragic Voice in an Age of Optimism
Dorothy Green is quite right when she notes that Grant Watson's psychological and metaphysical disturbance looks forward to the novels of Patrick White, although the…
1 May 1975 - English Heritage and Australian Culture: The Church and Literature of England in ‘Oscar and Lucinda’
In an interview on Canadian Radio, Peter Carey talked about a church from his home town in Australia that he had wanted to save -…
1 October 1995 - Apollo in George Street
The complete text of Wright's satirical response to the 1890s Bulletin writers and bohemians. See Michael Sharkey, in this issue, for an introduction to the…
1 October 1986 - The Asian Conspiracy : Deploying Voice/Deploying Story
‘This essay develops on the premise of imagining, which is the heart of story-making: imagine the physicality of story. Imagine the deployment strategies, the covert…
1 October 2010 - Literary Festivals and Cultural Consumption
The main concerns of this essay are the nature and intensity of the literary experience in the setting of the increasingly popular literary festivals in…
1 May 2009 - Annual Bibliography of Studies in Australian Literature : 20081 May 2009
- Bodies that Speak : Mediating Female Embodiment in Tim Winton’s Fiction
As a 'regional celebrity writer' of national and international acclaim, Australian writer Tim Winton contributes to the process of re- defining sustaining myths of identity…
1 June 2012 - On the Genealogy of Democracy : Reading Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America
As the epigraph for True History ifthe Kelly Gang (2000), Peter Carey chooses these lines from William Faulkner's Requiem for a Nun (1950): 'The past…
1 June 2012 - Alien Intoxications : The Aggressions of a Brisbane Opium Smoker
The scent of opium, the 'tears' of the poppy flower, the dried secretions of papaver somniferum, wafts throughout many histories of life in the late…
1 June 2012 - Patrick White, Saul Bellow and the Problem of Literary Value
‘Patrick White’s fiction has been ambivalently received. For all its celebration, dissenters continue to insist on a gap between its reputation and its actual achievements…
1 June 2012 - Annual Bibliography of Studies in Australian Literature: 1983
Provides a list of useful articles and books on Australian Literature, and also a selection of the most important reviews and prefaces, published in 1983.
1 May 1984 - Lesbia Harford’s Homefront Warrior and Women’s World War I Writing
Sometime during the early 1920s, Lesbia Harford wrote The Invaluable Mystery, a novel which concerns Sally, an urban working-class woman, and her struggle to…
1 May 1995 - Terra Australis : Landscape as Medium in Capricornia and Poor Fellow My Country
Since the finding of the Australian High Court in what has come to be known as the Mabo decision of January 1992, the phrase Terra…
1 May 1995 - Annual Bibliography of Studies in Australian Literature: 19941 May 1995
- Counter-Poetics
‘Michel Foucault defined history as ‘the discourse of power’ (Society 68), arguing that the function of a ‘counter-history’ is ‘to show that laws deceive, that…
1 June 2011 - Biopolitics and Eleanor Dark’s Prelude to Christopher
‘In 1934 Miles Franklin described Eleanor Dark’s second novel, Prelude to Christopher, as ‘a terribly beautiful piece of work’ (128). One of Dark’s earliest…
1 June 2011 - White Closets, Jangling Nerves and the Biopolitics of the Public Secret
‘This essay attempts to outline the relationship between the ‘raw nerves’ that Denis Byrne describes in the epigraph above, and the cultivation of ‘indifference’ that…
1 June 2011
Contributors
- Ruth Brown
- Merlinda Bobis
- David Carter
- David Crouch
- Donna Coates
- Simon During
- Marianne Ehrhardt
- Wilhelm Hiener
- J. E. Hiener
- J. J. Healy
- Carol Hetherington
- Carol Hetherington
- Mary Lord
- Peter Mathews
- Lyn McCredden
- Anne Maxwell
- Wenche Ommundsen
- Hal Porter
- Irmtraud Petersson
- Irmtraud Petersson
- Fiona Probyn
- Hannah Schuerholz
- David McKee Wright
- Lydia Wevers