AustLit

'Lately the two of us have been on the hunt for whitefella dreamings, although they are not hard to find. They are not the kind of Dreaming that Aboriginal people hold for Country, but something else: dreams whitefellas conjure up to make mischief, to claim power and mastery. This article traces Modern Australia back through colonial dreams—ones that were enlivened by the magic of Captain Cook and the tricks he pulled to claim possession over a third of the Australian continent for Britain’s king. It begins by considering the meanings and possibilities behind whitefella dreaming as a way of situating Cook as an ancestral spirit of Modern Australia. The article then looks at where Cook’s spirit might be hiding today, drawing on several instances of powerful mimetic surplus as counter-dreamings that break the spell of unknowing in the past and present. Finally, it searches for the magic beneath the magic of Cook’s claim of possession and offers a counter-dreaming of its own to reveal the continuation of that magic here in the present day.' (Publication abstract)

'The following article examines how Australian literary fiction by women is received in the United States. In particular, it considers how books are positioned by publishers, reviewers and authors as relevant to an American audience as well as to what extent Australian literary fiction’s appeal is borne out in reviews and in an online forum, Goodreads. To address these questions, I examine the US reception of three diverse literary novels by Australian women: Waanyi author Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book (Atria Books, 2016), Charlotte Wood’s The Weekend (Riverhead, 2020), and Michelle de Kretser’s Questions of Travel (Little, Brown, 2013). I argue that recent Australian literary fiction by women makes an appeal to US readers through a combination of “transnational orientation”—or ideas, characters and settings that a novel evokes to address a global readership—which are leveraged by publishers in book design and endorsements, and “authorial disambiguation”, in the form of essays and websites written by authors and addressed to local and global readers. Efforts to draw attention to a novel’s currency for a US audience are unevenly evident in reviews in broadsheets and trade publications, as well as on Goodreads.' (Publication abstract)

'Thomas Revel Johnson was a pioneering Australian sports journalist in the mid-19th century who also conducted a professional career as a surgeon. This article aims to examine Johnson’s achievements in Australian sports reporting as an emerging genre before it was taken seriously by the mainstream press. It also examines his place in a watershed libel case that cast him as a scapegoat and resulted in an unduly harsh two-year jail sentence. The article situates Johnson as part of a pre-Federation commercial media that attempted to establish a distinctly “Australian” voice, championing the underdog and working to undermine imported societal hierarchies.' (Publication abstract)

'Across the four novels Daniel Davis Wood has published to date, it is possible to delineate an evolving ethics of literary voice. His initial step in Blood and Bone is to subvert the third-person omniscient voice by drastically expanding the imaginative abilities of the first-person narrator, thus showing how the narrator must always speak through a subjective position. The second step involves examining the extent to which the narrator’s desire is not their own: the narrator of Unspeakable is portrayed as the victim of toxic narcissism and media manipulation, for instance, while the protagonist of At the Edge of the Solid World is so alienated from his own emotions that he relives the calamities of others to process his own tragedy. Despite possessing the quasi-omniscient powers of Blood and Bone, these two narrators, far from being godlike, are shown to be puppets of desires that are not their own. The outcome is the dissolution of the subjective “I” in In Ruins, in which the narrator comes to understand the Otherness that permeates human subjectivity. Moral failures are dissolved by the inability to say “I”, making the new ethical task bearing witness to the desire of the Other.' (Publication abstract)

'In Anson Cameron’s The Last Pulse, the monkeywrenching protagonist blasts a dam in Queensland, rides on the resulting flood southwards and spreads his solastalgia around, an affect Glenn Albrecht defines as homesickness at home induced by local ecological loss. From water disputes overseas to those between the eastern Australian states, from the character’s drought-stricken home town in South Australia to the Murray–Darling Basin, the novel allows readers to experience solastalgia as a multiscalar affect capable of mobilising environmental activism, as well as mooring in and playing with the “arts of flow” informed by Indigenous water ethics. The scale and distance-conscious method of “proximate reading” can be applied to read the dynamic of the affect in such an expanded and sentient water ecology; in this way, it can provide crucial insights into how readers’ environmental feelings and thinking are constantly reconfigured alongside shifting borders within and beyond the watershed in the novel.' (Publication abstract)

'This article offers a critical engagement with Billy Griffiths’s award-winning book Deep Time Dreaming: Uncovering Ancient Australia as a departure point towards uncovering and examining a significant tradition of Australian cultural reflection and interpretation it terms, following Anthony Moran, indigenising settler nationalism. Tracing the genealogy of the indigenising settler-nationalist tendencies that shape Deep Time Dreaming, and to which the text itself contributes, the article situates Griffiths’s contribution as a recent and notable exemplar of a longstanding historiographical tradition that responds to the continuing crisis of settler-national belonging and legitimacy by attempting to incorporate the historical depth of Indigenous occupation into its own national, nationalising narrative, and so to indigenise the settler nation itself. The tradition is not Griffiths’s alone. When read in the context of a broader indigenising settler-nationalist tradition, Griffiths’s approach is revealed as neither unusually problematic nor uniquely complicit in the dynamics the article draws attention to. On the contrary, the genealogical reading of Griffiths’s work I offer here is important precisely to the extent that it facilitates an understanding of the underlying tendencies towards settler indigenisation that continue to condition Australian settler-national/ist historiography, and culture at large.' (Publication abstract)

'Boundary Crossers offers a history of bushrangers who have been forgotten, misremembered or neglected. Meg Foster’s central premise in Boundary Crossers is that “not all bushrangers were white men”, and she offers case studies of four “other” bushrangers to prove it. William Douglas, for example, was a widely feared African-American bushranger on the goldfields of Victoria in the 1850s, to whom two chapters are devoted. There is a chapter each on Sam Poo, a Chinese man accused of bushranging in the 1860s, and Mary Ann Bugg, a Worimi Aboriginal woman who lived on the run with her better-known white bushranging partner, Captain Thunderbolt, and two final chapters on Jimmy Governor, a self-styled bushranger popularised in Thomas Keneally’s The Chant of Jimmie Blacksmith. Each chapter sketches out its subject’s backstory, to which Foster adds details and context to paint a more complex picture.' (Introduction)

'From the cover to its conclusion, Tiwi Story: Turning History Downside Up leads readers with care and consideration through a nuanced and varied understanding of Australian histories. Tiwi Story offers outsiders physical evidence of oral histories that have been well known and distributed among communities in the northern Countries. In so doing, Tiwi Stories challenges the narratives on which White Australia crafts, hones and weaponises an identity of ownership not only over land, waterways and skies, but also over stories and knowing the past. Tiwi Story, as the Tiwi historian and educator Mavis Kerinaiua tells readers, is a history intended to act as a form of truth-telling leading to “healing” (1)—a point that carries even greater significance after the recent “no” vote on an Australian Voice to Parliament.' (Introduction)

'Reviewing a book that opens with a full six pages of endorsements from a veritable who’s who of Australia’s knowledge classes is an intimidating task, but here we are. Among others whose opinions I have no standing, or desire, to contradict, Melissa Lucashenko welcomes Julianne Schultz’s The Idea of Australia as a “valuable contribution to the debate over what Australia is, once was, and might yet become”. Here, I offer my critical engagement with the book in the context of this debate, which continues, interminably, to this day.' (Introduction)