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James Dunk James Dunk i(8539506 works by)
Gender: Male
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Works By

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1 Unease and Disease : Redrawing the Boundaries of Colonial Madness James Dunk , 2021 single work essay
— Appears in: Griffith Review , April no. 72 2021; (p. 122-131) 'OVER THE COURSE of eight years I researched and wrote a book, Bedlam at Botany Bay, about colonial madness in Australia. I read the records generated by the projects undertaken here – endeavours at every scale, from simple survival through to the efforts of empires to mobilise labour, capital and morality. Letters scratched out by the two outsized, Crown-appointed spiders working from the stone house on the rise above the eastern shore of Warrane (Sydney Harbour) and transmitted to the buildings thrown up around the edge of the water; the second settlement at Parramatta; the outstations in contested areas; the penal stations on far-flung islands; and the lair of the hulking old beast half a world away on Downing Street. I read case notes scribbled by half-trained doctors, case law by half-trained lawyers, editorials and newsprint written in the same inflated, pompous register in which it seems that many of the better-heeled colonists prosecuted their lives. The spiders spun without cease a taut, geometric thing strung over the uneven, ungainly contours of the colony, over the actual life of the world I was working to reconstruct. Somewhere within this close web, and the stray silken threads spun silent across the water by every person with access to ink and paper and language, somewhere within and inside all this lovely, suffocating gossamer lay the monstrous and mundane matter of colonisation: a thing so ordinary anyone could do it and so special some felt called to it and so awful that it continues to poison the land and everything on it.' (Introduction)
1 [Review] Memorandoms by James Martin : An Astonishing Escape from Early New South Wales James Dunk , 2017 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , December no. 397 2017; (p. Online only)
— Review of Memorandoms by James Martin James Martin , 1937 single work autobiography

'In 1784 William Bryant was sentenced, rather optimistically, to be transported to the American colonies. Britain had just lost the War of Independence; Bryant thus languished in a hulk in Portsmouth while Britain adjusted to the loss. This meant that when he finally arrived in New South Wales with the First Fleet, Bryant’s sentence was set to expire in just three years. Perhaps he did not trust imperial record-keeping – not without cause; perhaps he noticed that there was no plan to return convicts home after their sentences expired. In late March 1791, Bryant and eight others took matters into their own hands and escaped.' (Introduction)
1 Empathy for a Convict Conflicts with the Harsh Reality of Stolen Land: James Dunk Reviews ‘Cotter: A Novel’ by Richard Begbie James Dunk , 2017 single work essay
— Appears in: Rochford Street Review , January – March no. 21 2017; 'While the ‘convict stain’ has become a tired cliché in Australian history writing, it is a more interesting facet of Australian fiction. The fact that many of the early British colonists were criminals transported here against their will complicates the common colonial narratives and generalisations, as Kate Grenville showed in her immensely popular The Secret River (2005). Through Australian historical fiction, readers have become introduced the ‘good convict’ drawn into terrible acts of violence partly, because of the injustices of penal transportation.' (Introduction)
1 Review : The Profilist : The Notebooks of Ethan Dibble James Dunk , 2016 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , January-February no. 378 2016; (p. 47)
— Review of The Profilist Adrian Mitchell , 2015 single work novel
1 Crooked Path James Dunk , 2016 single work review essay
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , November no. 386 2016; (p. 66) 'Edward sits on Sydney Harbour Bridge, considering jumping. It is 1948, and he has written several times to George VI about building a new naval base in the waters below, and not hearing back, begun to build it himself. Edward was manic depressive, suffering from what is now called bipolar disorder. Greg de Moore and Ann Westmore begin their book Finding Sanity: John Cade, lithium and the taming of bipolar disorder with Edward; they end it with the patient upon whom lithium was pioneered in the early 1950s, Bill Brand. Where Edward came down from the bridge and returned to the peaks and troughs of bipolar life, Bill entered a tortuous triangle of treatment and suffering with the Australian psychiatrist John Cade and that soft, white, lightest of metals, lithium, before finally dying of lithium poisoning.' (Introduction)
1 "A Vision of Past Savagery That Lies Maddeningly between Truth and Fiction” : James Dunk Reviews Sarah Drummond’s ‘The Sound’ James Dunk , 2016 single work review
— Appears in: Rochford Street Review , July-September no. 19 2016;
— Review of The Sound : A Novel Sarah Drummond , 2016 single work novel
1 James Dunk Reviews 'Seasons of War' by Christopher Lee James Dunk , 2015 single work review
— Appears in: Australian Book Review , April no. 370 2015;
— Review of Seasons of War Christopher Lee , 2015 single work novel
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