AustLit

'“How good are novels!” So thinks protagonist Alice Fox in This Devastating Fever, the third novel from former publisher Sophie Cunningham. Alice is preparing to chair a panel at a writers’ festival, just as Covid-19 hits the headlines in March 2020.' (Introduction)

'In 2008, fervent public debate followed the announcement that the new national Australian Curriculum, then in early development, would mandate the study of Australian literature for all students ‘across the compulsory years of schooling’ (Davies, Martin and Buzacott 21). Conservative commentators welcomed what they saw as assurance that ‘young Australians’ would learn ‘to appreciate, value and celebrate this nation’s identity and history’ (Donnelly, ‘A Canon’). More progressive voices argued that rather than the texts to be read, focus should be on practices of reading that respond to ‘students’ needs, interests and experiences as national and global citizens’ (Davies 47-8). Conservatives were less enthused by the final language of the new curriculum: in Quadrant, self-proclaimed ‘culture warrior’ Kevin Donnelly complained that it had replaced the Western canon and Judeo-Christian morals with ‘politically correct perspectives’, likely the three cross-curriculum priorities: Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander histories and cultures, Asia and Australia’s engagement with Asia, and sustainability (Donnelly, ‘The Ideology of the National English Curriculum 28, 27; ACARA, ‘Cross-curriculum Priorities’). Australian Curriculum: English is separated into three strands, ‘language’, ‘literature’ and ‘literacy’, each with an enormous set of extensively detailed descriptors, outcomes and performance indicators (ACARA, ‘English’). Teachers and educators worried that its unwieldiness would create a ‘culture of compliance and checking off… content’ that in turn risked extinguishing students’ capacity for ‘creativity and critical engagement’ (Moni 15; Davies, Doecke and Mead 22).' (Introduction)

'This book examines literary representations of Sydney and its waterway in the context of Australian modernism and modernity in the interwar period. Then as now, Sydney Harbour is both an ecological wonder and ladened with economic, cultural, historical and aesthetic significance for the city by its shores. In Australia’s earliest canon of urban fiction, writers including Christina Stead, Dymphna Cusack, Eleanor Dark, Kylie Tennant and M. Barnard Eldershaw explore the myth and the reality of the city ‘built on water’. Mapping Sydney via its watery and littoral places, these writers trace impacts of empire, commercial capitalism, global trade and technology on the city, while drawing on estuarine logics of flow and blockage, circulation and sedimentation to innovate modes of writing temporally, geographically and aesthetically specific to Sydney’s provincial modernity. Contributing to the growing field of oceanic or aqueous studies, Sydney and its Waterway and Australian Modernism shows the capacity of water and human-water relations to make both generative and disruptive contributions to urban topography and narrative topology.'

Source : publisher's blurb

'This article reads Thea Astley’s final novel in the context of rhetoric about the death of Australian literature that has been a mainstay of our national culture almost since its inception. In the early 2000s, a new round of obituarists argued that the global publishing industry, critical trends and changing educational pedagogies were eroding Australia’s literary identity. Drylands, published in 1999, can be considered a slightly prescient participant in this conversation: it is subtitled A Book for the World’s Last Reader, seemingly framing the novel in a polemics of decline. My reading, however, sees the book as the product of two correlated yet combative literary projects: the attempt by its primary narrator, Janet Deakin, to write a book after what she sees as the likely death of reading and writing; and Astley’s more nuanced exploration of the role of literature in settler colonial modernity. Reading across the seven narratives that constitute the book, I argue that Drylands performs the fraught relationship between ethics and aesthetics in the context of writing about the systemic violence of the settler colonial state, questioning literary privilege, exclusivity and complicity in ways that remain relevant to debates regarding Australian literature today.' (Publication abstract)

'In Sydney, the period between the two world wars was a time of rapid change, when ‘modern’ was considered a goal to which the city and its people should strive. The 1930s were bookended by the opening of the Harbour Bridge in 1932 and the 1938 Sesquicentenary of the First Fleet’s landing, two events that figured Sydney as the triumphant end point of a narrative of national, white Australian progress. This period also saw the publication of a number of novels by Australian women writers that took the contemporary city as their setting and scrutinised urban modernity as a state of being and an ideological position. This thesis takes as its focus five novels that depict and debate the multiple and often combative discourses of modernity that flowed through Australia’s first and most populous urban centre in the interwar period: Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934) by Christina Stead, Jungfrau (1936) by Dymphna Cusack, Waterway (1938) by Eleanor Dark, Foveaux (1939) by Kylie Tennant, and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow (1947; 1983) by M. Barnard Eldershaw. Through close reading within and across the novels, I argue that this generation of women writers pioneered a distinctly Australian, modern urban poetics that is best described as aqueous. Responding to Sydney as a dynamic estuarine environment, each writer mobilises water as location and literary device, infusing the modern city’s spaces and processes with productively aqueous qualities of changeability and circulation, unsettlement and motility. Making heuristic use of a Benjaminian framework for dialectical urban thinking, I read this aqueous poetics of Sydney against the narrative of progress epitomised by the Bridge and Sesquicentenary, arguing that in contradistinction to this narrative, the novels present an Australian urban modernity of material emplacement in an unpredictably watery sphere, where history settles and sediments, multiple ideological schemas flow into one another, and relations between bodies, space and power generate constant contestation.'

Source: Abstract.

'In the opening scene of Eleanor Dark’s novel Waterway (1938), Oliver Denning drives over Sydney’s South Head through the dawn, looking out over the red roofs of Watsons Bay to the harbour below. Oliver’s elevated perspective and physical distance allow him to offer readers a holistic assessment of Sydney, one hundred and fifty years after white settlement. As a doctor, Oliver relies on medical metaphors for his description, diagnosing the city as a germinating disease, ‘the growth of whose parent cells had fastened upon the land’ in 1788 (11). Struggling to reconcile with its cost—a land ‘violated,’ a people decimated—Denning finds himself wishing to ‘annihilate the city’ (12, 11). As the scene continues, however, the doctor forces himself to reconfirm his connection to the present place and time, as Dark shifts to second person to enfold the reader in a vision of radical community:

You were one of the red roofs, and all about you, on this shore and on the opposite shore, from Balgowah to Parramatta, were your neighbours, the other red roofs … He was very well pleased that it should be so. … What you see now, spreading itself over the foreshores, reaching back far out of sight, and still back into the very heart of the land, is something in whose ultimate good you must believe or perish. The red roofs and the quiet grey city become intimate and precious—part of a story of which you yourself are another part, and whose ending neither you nor they will see. (12-13)

'In Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), Christina Stead evokes the city’s history in her naming of the Tank Stream Press, the novel’s central location. The fresh water Tank Stream assured the colony’s survival in its fledgling years; however, it soon became an open sewer and was buried as a stormwater drain in order to maintain public health. This essay argues that Stead uses the Tank Stream’s watery history to shape a narrative about cultural life and urban modernity in early twentieth-century Sydney. The functioning of the business is informed by the stream’s various identities of essential water supply, sewer and drain: at times, it seems as if culture and learning may usher in an intellectual and internationalist utopia in the city, liberating the minds and bodies of those who inhabit it; at others, all such hope is lost. The narrative Stead develops around the printery and its employees brings local place into contact with transnational socialist and other intellectual discourses, and links both to culture as a material, interactive force within the urban milieu. Through a close reading of the Tank Stream Press, this essay explores the novel’s conflicted vision of culture, politics and urbanity in modern Sydney.'

Source: Abstract.

'Elizabeth Harrower’s first novel, Down in the City (1957), introduces concerns that define her oeuvre, offering a typically adroit depiction of destructive domestic relations and middle-class mores. Focused on the marriage of upper-class Esther Prescott and ‘boy from the back blocks’ Stan Petersen, the novel embeds this central narrative in a compelling portrait of Australian urban modernity. The novel’s eponymous city is Sydney in the immediate postwar period, which Harrower writes with attention to its booming industry, new wealth and burgeoning commodity culture. At the beginning of the novel and at certain points throughout it, the city seems to offer sensuous enjoyment, increased liberty; however, Harrower emphasizes an urban modernity under the spell of capitalism and commodity culture, dominated by ‘air-conditioned’, ‘disinfectant-smelling’ spaces of ‘no light, no land, no sea’. In these spaces of urban alienation, female autonomy is circumscribed and interpersonal relationships are destructive. Arguing that this depiction of the urban milieu is central to the novel, this essay explores the narrative’s presentation of space and its capacity to produce subjectivities and condition relations.'

Source: Abstract.