AustLit

'The conference coincided with the fortieth anniversary of both the Archives and of Mardi Gras, providing a timely point to consider not only how solidarities might be generated but also how to sustain and develop them. In also celebrating the start of Deakin University's Gender and Sexuality Studies Research Network, the conference was a reminder of the shifting histories of precarity and support within the academy and the complex issues that emerge in traversing the academy and communities. What does it mean to have a history or histories, what are the critical intersections of all our stories?" Closing with a reading of the "Uluru Statement from the Heart," Nestle's address situated these questions in the context of hopes for a decolonised future: what kind of solidarities will that require? In the Anthropocene where "even our breathing/seems to warm/the world too much," she suggests that maybe it is better to gather "my own disturbing junk heap" and to "not over-tread." [...]her poem, "The Wind Has No Borders," reflects on the importance of listening to others rather than just speaking one's own histories.' (Introduction)

'The author puts forward the idea that identities-even those that are understood as belonging to a "post-gay" era in which subjectivity is less rigidly defined in binary and oppositional terms-scaffold upon the lives and experiences of the past, in both political and poetic ways. Whenever I leave my home in coastal Victoria to visit Melbourne I encounter the city as an uncanny space: it is both familiar and alien to me, rich with memories of people and events, of sex and love and disappointment, of study and work, of endless coffees and conversations, bars and clubs, buildings which have been demolished or repurposed, trams that are now almost silent... Whoever I was with, whoever- mates, my mum, a whole fucking form of spotty-faced teenagers- whoever I was with I had to fool, linger at that newsstand snaking down the flank of Spencer Street Station, where some fella, some rat-haired fella, sold me a copy of OutRage: stuffed it in a paper bag, like he was posting my hard-on home. For me, the magazine I bought regularly from that newsstand at Spencer Street Station signalled a kind of gay habitus-a whole world of homosexuality-that was layered on and over the city, a space where anything might-could-would-happen.' (Publication abstract)

'This article explores how Patrick White is both an inheritor and a precursor of modernism and its queer and gendered legacies within mid-twentieth century Australia; these experimental legacies are still felt today, with queer authors producing even queerer texts amid the Australian literary landscape. Focusing upon his novel The Twyborn Affair (1979), I argue that White's use of modernist aesthetics enables him to achieve a complete corporeal identity by writing the queer body as, paradoxically, both fragmentary and fluid. His prose both resituates gendered binaries and boundaries, and enables ways of navigating the epistemological trauma enacted upon the queer self by heteronormativity. Attending to the fragmentation and fluidity that White's modernism unleashes, this paper is especially interested in the becoming of a queer self, and it seeks to salvage moments of queer desire from a fractured identity in contention with the conformity demanded by mandatory heterosexuality. These legacies that White leaves for us are especially pertinent to our present as his deconstruction of binary notions of gender and queer narratives "opens up" spaces where an articulation of an Australian queer self can recognise its inherently transgressive agency.'  (Publication abstract)

'Over his prolific artistic and authorial career Norman Lindsay published eleven novels for adults. Spanning more than fifty years from the publication of A Curate in Bohemia in 1913 to Rooms and Houses in 1968, the focus of Lindsay's writing was usually small sets of characters in country towns or city rooming houses. The production of heteronormative, binary gender was a focus of Lindsay's work, and his use of the male/female, masculine/feminine binary is present, and explicitly delineated, throughout all his fiction. Of these eleven novels only two have female protagonists; The Cousin from Fiji (1945) and Dust or Polish? (1950). Lindsay's narrative attempts to explore the feminine within these two texts do demonstrate, however, the continued influence of the masculine author and reader through a triangulation of the controlling male gaze.' (Introduction)