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 record, nationalism often appears to have been little other than racism and sexism. Race was…
1 October 1999 - Interview with Hal Porter1 May 1978
- Literary Composition on Board a Convict Ship : The ‘Pestonjee Bomanjee Journal’1 October 1969
- Grant Watson and the Aborigine : A Tragic Voice in an Age of Optimism1 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 - an incident which became the inspiration for Oscar and Lucinda. Carey explained: “I lived…
1 October 1995 - Apollo in George Street1 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 ‘translations’ of difference’ that facilitate the entry of the Other story through the gate.
And…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 Australia.
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 and belonging in the white Australian imaginary (see Huggan 7). Emerging as a West Australian…
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 is not dead. It is not even past' (Carey, True 2). Contained in these words…
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 nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Besides its considerable impact on the trade between nations and…
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. In this essay, I want to take a step towards strengthening our assessment of it…
1 June 2012 - Annual Bibliography of Studies in Australian Literature : 19831 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 survive on her own when her German-born father, Mr Putman, and brother, Max, are interned…
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 Australis which is much used by Herbert might be taken to represent a significantly altered…
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 kings wear masks, that power creates illusions, and the historians tell lies’ (Bainbridge 58). Writing…
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 critics, Franklin attributed the book’s strength to the author’s deft handling of a tragic theme…
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 Stanner identifies as being characteristic of ‘European life’ in Australia. Here I situate indifference as…
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