AustLit

Sophie Cunningham's debut novel. Geography (2004) opens with its protagonist Catherine watching a green sea turtle covering its eggs on a beach in Tangalla, Sri Lanka. His anxiety about the turtle's unborn young concentrates around her own fears and insecurities: -It is hard, but necessary, to feel hopeful that It will survive- (1-2). In Sri Lanka, Catherine befriends fellow traveller Ruby. to whom she recounts the long story of her damaged life throughout the novel. Tanaka is not only the starting point of the narrative, but also of a cathartic process of healing. forgiveness and sexual discovery that shifts constantly between Australia. the United States, India and Sri Lanka in a vast geography of desire signalled by the novel's title. Today Cunningham is regarded as a preeminent ecological author. combining serious concerns about the degradation of the planet with a political awareness of the "geographical articulations' (30), as Edward Said puts it. that define the contested space created by the legacy of colonisation. These ideas are framed by an affective topology articulated long before she began writing about ecology, and it is the refinement of these ideas over time that this essay sets out to explore.' (Introduction) 
 

'The stumps under our floor are teeming and though not the cause it is nevertheless a cause for alarm, the weight o thousands of books we have partially shelved but also stacked in piles of varying consonance impossible to discard. Yet despite this number, it is the handful of books. missing through loans or misfortune, that haunt me. Though not uncommon for me particularly this hinges on an inheritance of familial experience, and I am predisposed to regard that which is missing as a great and gaping hole in which one aught never discern a silver lining, but rather a direct and literal loss, since our lives have been lived as much in the absence of things as in the presence of what has come to replace them.' (Introduction) 
 

'In May 2023 6 poets, Jas H Duke, Peter Murphy, thalia, Sandy Caldow, Arjun von Caemmerer, and myself, held an exhibition of concrete poetry 'Wayword Forword' at the Nicholas Building in Melbourne, curated by Victoria Perin. It attracted a large number of people over its 3 weeks on the wall, and generated a lot of discussion about the place of concrete poetry in the annals of Australian art history and poetry.' (Introduction)