Place & identity

If, as Dean MacCannell argues, tourism is the quest for a 'reality' and an 'authenticity' that are thought to be always 'elsewhere' (160), then it…

In this essay I want to use Riders in the Chariot to suggest another way of reading the politics of White's modernism. The world of…

Literary biography has both its friends and its enemies. Readers of the genre may be fans of particular authors, or may be addicted to literary…

The image of the journey in time characterises much of twentieth-century fiction--Joyce, Mann, Proust, Svevo and Woolf bear witness--and finds in Australian writing a fertile…

The refrain of Randolph Stow's 'Outrider' echoes throughout his work as a central, counterpointed theme. Like a descant moving further and further away from its…

Like Patrick White and Randolph Stow. Christopher Koch explores in his fiction the post-colonial Australian identity, not in an exclusively political sense, but rather in…

Writer Carmel Bird shares her recollections of growing up in Tasmania.

It is no surprise that George Johnston's prize-winning novel, My Brother Jack (1964), has often been seen as a reflection upon the self or a…

Tucker examines the representation of landscape in Asian-Australian women’s writing in terms of the aesthetics of Australian literature.

Malouf's choice of subject matter is not arbitrary. His story is one version of an archetypal Romantic story, whose particulars change according to the teller…

As a fiction writer I have a rather privileged role, in that when I'm required to give a paper or deliver a speech it is…

Randolph Stow discusses his career, approach to writing, inspiration and travel, among other topics.

Discussing the maps, geographical images and geometric figures that abound in Malouf's work, Leer argues that geography provides Malouf with tropes through which to explore…

Suburbia has been a neuralgic point in debates about Australian culture and Australian identity since the end of the nineteenth century. Louis Esson's 1911 diatribe…

The Australian intelligentsia's critical or ambivalent response to the suburbs and suburbia has been well-documented, though the gender-blindness of urban theorising often goes unremarked (Harman…

Andrew McGahan's Praise, Edward Berridge's Lives of the Saints and Clare Mendes' Drift Street explore the psychosocial and psychosexual limitations and excesses of young…

Our first scene is a Western Sydney suburban lounge-room seventeen years ago. It is very clean and tidy and full of shelves and little tables…

Examines the “notion of place in Murray’s work, the complex nature of Bunyah as a ‘centre of the world’, and how a poetics of place…

Discusses David Malouf's Harland's Half Acre (1984), Thomas Keneally's A Family Madness (1985) and Rodney Hall's Captivity Captive (1988), arguing that 'All three insist, in…

My title is borrowed from the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood whose 1972 novel Surfacing opens with the unnamed (English-speaking) central character returning to the small…