AustLit

'Virtual Voyages is a fascinating account of the European discovery of the elusive 'great south land' told through the literature of 'imaginary voyages'. Written at the height of the era of European maritime exploration, these bizarre and captivating tales, with their wildly imaginative visions of antipodean inversion and strangeness, reveal a hidden history of attitudes to colonization. By exposing the relationship between myth and reality in the antipodes, this book casts new light on the power of fiction to influence history.

In the post-colonial studies field, books about travel writing and empire have tended to focus on the high period of nineteenth-century imperialism and on the colonial settings of Africa and India. This book offers a fresh perspective by focussing on the eighteenth century, and referring to the geographical region of Australia and the Pacific, which has had far less attention. The book also breaks new ground by being the first to approach the genre of the imaginary voyage from a post-colonial perspective.

In addition to the new insights into European colonialism that it offers, the book illustrates many broader themes in eighteenth-century history and thought. These include connections between the rise of science and modern imperialism, the development of narrative history and fiction and the influence of romanticism, the evolution of the early novel in Britain and France, and the role of mythology in the development of national identity.

Readership: The book is aimed at an academic readership and will be of interest to scholars working across a wide range of fields. These include travel writing, eighteenth-century and early modern studies, post-colonial studies, history of the novel, British and French colonial history, transnational history, Australian studies, Pacific studies, romanticism, realism, mythology, and utopian thought.; (Publisher website)

'Australian photographer and film maker Frank Hurley became an international celebrity through his reporting of the Mawson and Shackleton Antarctic Expeditions, the First and Second World Wars, the England-Australia air race of 1919, and his own expeditions to Papua in the 1920s. This book is an account of his stage and screen practice in the context of early twentieth-century mass media.

'Photography, Early Cinema and Colonial Modernity' is not a biography of Frank Hurley the man; it is instead an examination of the social life of the many marvellous and meaningful things he made as a professional photographer and film maker in the early twentieth century: the negatives, photographic prints, lantern slides, stereographs, films, diaries and newspaper articles. His stage and screen practices offer an insight into Australia's engagement with the romance and wonder of international modernity in the early years of the twentieth century. The level of description at which this volume works is not that of personality or the originary events of Hurley's life - the Mawson and Shackleton Antarctic Expeditions, and the First and Second World Wars - but the media events he worked so hard and so professionally to create. He called them his 'synchronized lecture entertainments'.

'These media events were at once national and international; they involved Hurley in an entire culture industry comprising many kinds of personnel, practices and texts that were constantly in movement along global lines of travel and communication, and in a variety of institutional locations around the world. This raises complex questions both about the authorship of Hurley's photographic and filmic texts - which were often produced and presented by other people - and about their ontology, since they were in a more or less constant state of re-assemblage in response to changing market opportunities. This unique study re-imagines, from inside the quiet and stillness of the archive, the prior social life of Hurley's creations as they were once accelerated through the complicated topography of the early twentieth century's rapidly internationalizing mass media landscape. As a way to conceive of that space and the social life of the people and things within it, this study uses the concept of 'colonial modernity'.' (Publication summary)

'Patrick White (1912–1990) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1973 and remains one of Australia’s most celebrated writers. This book represents new work by an outstanding list of White scholars from around the globe. This collection of diverse and original essays is notable for its acknowledgement of White’s homosexuality in relation to the development of his literary style, in its consideration of the way his writing ‘works’ on/with readers, and for its contextualizing of his life and oeuvre in relation to London and to London life.' (Publication summary)

'This exacting study examines the theatre, film and activism engaged with the representation or participation of asylum seekers and refugees in the twenty-first century. Cox shows how this work has been informed by and indeed contributed to the consolidation of ‘irregular’ noncitizenship as a cornerstone idea in contemporary Australian political and social life, to the extent that it has become impossible to imagine what Australia means without it.' (Publication summary)

'Christos Tsiolkas is one of the most recognizable and internationally successful literary novelists working in Australia today. He is also one of the country’s most politically engaged writers. These terms – recognition, commercial success, political engagement – suggest a relationship to forms of public discourse that belies the extremely confronting nature of much of Tsiolkas’s fiction and his deliberate attempt to cultivate a literary persona oriented to notions of blasphemy, obscenity and what could broadly be called a pornographic sensibility. ‘Christos Tsiolkas and the Fiction of Critique’ traces these contradictions against Tsiolkas’s acute sense of the waning of working-class identity, and reads his work as a sustained examination of the ways in which literature might express an opposition to capitalist modernity.' (Publication summary)

'Australia is the planet's sole island continent. This book argues that the uniqueness of this geography has shaped Australian history and culture, including its literature. Further, it shows how the fluctuating definition of the island continent throws new light on the relationship between islands and continents in the mapping of modernity. The book links the historical and geographical conditions of islands with their potent role in the imaginary of European colonisation. It prises apart the tangled web of geography, fantasy, desire and writing that has framed the Western understanding of islands: their real and material conditions and their symbolic resonance from antiquity into globalised modernity. The book also traces how this spatial imaginary has shaped the modern'man'who is imagined as being the island's natural inhabitant or mirror. Importantly, the book challenges these habits of thought by their relocation within larger topological and imaginary visions from islanders themsleves.' 

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'‘Finding Queensland in Australian Cinema’ comprises eight essays, an introduction and conclusion, and the analysis of poetics and cultural geographies is focused on landmark films and television. The first section of the book, ‘Backtracks: Landscape and Identity’, refers to films from and before the revival, beginning with the 1978 film 'The Irishman' as an example of heritage cinema in which performances of gender and race, like the setting, suggest a romanticised and uncritical image of colonial Australia. It is compared to Baz Luhrmann’s 'Australia' (2008) and several other films. In the second chapter, ‘Heritage Enigmatic’, 'The Irishman' is also drawn into comparison with Charles Chauvel’s ‘Jedda’ (1955), as films that incorporate Indigenous performances in this heritage discourse through the role of voice and sound. In Part 2, ‘Silences in Paradise’, the first essay, ‘Tropical Gothic’, focuses on Rachel Perkins’s 'Radiance' (1998) as a landmark post-colonial film that questions the connotations of icons of paradise in Queensland. The discussion leads to films, in the next chapter, ‘Island Girls Friday’, that figure women on Queensland islands, spanning the pre-revival and contemporary era: ‘Age of Consent’ (1969), ‘Nim’s Island’ (2008) and ‘Uninhabited’ (2010). Part 3, ‘Masculine Dramas of the Coast’ moves to the Gold Coast, in films dating from before and since the current spike in transnational production at the Warner Roadshow film studios there, namely, 'The Coolangatta Gold' (1984), 'Peter Pan' (2003), and 'Sanctum' (2011). The final section, ‘Regional Backtracks’, turns, first, to two television series, ‘Remote Area Nurse’ (2006), and ‘The Straits’ (2012), that share unique provenance of production in the Torres Strait and far north regions of Queensland, while, in the final chapter, the iconic outback districts of western Queensland figure the convergence of land, landscape and location in films with potent perspectives on Indigenous histories in ‘The Proposition’ (2005) and ‘Mystery Road’ (2013). ‘Finding Queensland in Australian Cinema’ presents the various regions as syncretic spaces subject to transitions of social and industry practices over time.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Walkabout magazine was one of the most influential and innovative Australian magazines across much of the twentieth century and it is long overdue for an extended, appreciative study of its internal and external dynamics. Mitchell Rolls and Anna Johnston provide the significant and innovative study the magazine deserves drawing attention to its complex engagement with the natural environment and the land as resource, with history and heritage, with Aboriginal and Pacific Island cultures.' —David Carter, Fellow at Australian Academy of the Humanities

''Travelling Home' provides a detailed analysis of the contribution that the mid twentieth-century 'Walkabout' magazine made to Australia’s cultural history. Spanning five central decades of the twentieth century (1934-1974), 'Walkabout' was integral to Australia’s sense of itself as a nation. By advocating travel—both vicarious and actual—'Walkabout' encouraged settler Australians to broaden their image of the nation and its place in the Pacific region. In this way, 'Walkabout' explicitly aimed to make its readers feel at home in their country, as well as including a diverse picture of Aboriginal and Pacific cultures. Like National Geographic in the United States, Walkabout presented a cornucopia of images and information that was accessible to a broad readership.

'Given its wide availability and distribution, together with its accessible and entertaining content, 'Walkabout' changed how Australia was perceived, and the magazine is recalled with nostalgic fondness by most if not all of its former readers. Many urban readers learnt about Indigenous peoples and cultures through the many articles on these topics, and although these representations now seem dated and at times discriminatory, they provide a lens through which to see how contemporary attitudes about race and difference were defined and negotiated.

'Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship, 'Travelling Home' engages with key questions in literary, cultural, and Australian studies about national identity and modernity. The book’s diverse topics demonstrate how 'Walkabout' canvassed subtle and shifting fields of representation. Grounded in the archival history of the magazine’s production, the book addresses questions key to Australian cultural history. These include an investigation of middle-brow print culture and the writers who contributed to Walkabout, and the role of 'Walkabout' in presenting diverse and often conflicting information about Indigenous and other non-white cultures. Other chapters examine how popular natural history enabled scientists and readers alike to define an unique Australian landscape, and to debate how a modernising nation could preserve its bush while advocating industrial and agricultural development. While the nation is central to 'Walkabout' magazine’s imagined world, Australia is always understood to be part of the Pacific region in complex ways that included neo-colonialism, and Pacific content was prominent in the magazine. Through complex and nuanced readings of Australian literary and cultural history, 'Travelling Home' reveals how vernacular understandings of key issues in Australia’s cultural history were developed and debated in this accessible and entertaining magazine.' (Publication summary)

'The Aboriginal art movement flourished during a period in which the Australian public were awakened to the implications of the state’s decision to confront the legacies of colonisation and bring Aboriginal culture into the heart of national public life. Rather than seeing this radical political and social transformation as mere context for Aboriginal art’s emergence, this study argues that Aboriginal art has in fact mediated Australian society’s negotiation of the changing status of Aboriginal culture over the last century. This argument is illustrated through the analysis of Aboriginal art’s volatility as both a high art movement and a phenomenon of visual and commercial culture. This analysis reveals the agendas to which Aboriginal art has been anchored at the nexus of the redemptive project of the settler state, Indigenous movements for rights and recognition, and the aspirations of progressive civil society.

'At its heart this study is concerned with the broader social and cultural insights that can be gleaned from conducting a sustained inquiry into Aboriginal art’s contested meanings. To achieve this it focuses upon the hopeful and disenchanted faces of the Aboriginal art phenomenon: the ideals of cultural revitalisation and empowerment that have converged upon the art, and the countervailing narratives of exploitation, degradation and futility. Both aspects are traced through a range of settings in which the tensions surrounding Aboriginal art’s aesthetic, political and significance have been negotiated. It is in this dialectic that the vexed ethical questions underlying Australia’s settler state condition can most clearly be identified, and we can begin to navigate the paradoxes and impasses underlying the redemptive national project of the post-assimilation era.  (Publication summary)

'An account of fraught and complex cross-cultural literary exchange between two highly distinct - even uniquely opposed - reading contexts, Reading Through the Iron Curtain has resonance for all newly global reckonings of the cultural cold war. Working from the extraordinary records of the East German publishing and censorship regime, the authors materially track the production and reception of one country’s corpus as envisioned by another - the ninety Australian titles published in the GDR form an alternative canon, revealing a shadowy literary archive that rewrites Australia’s postwar cultural history from behind the iron curtain, and illuminate multiple ironies for the GDR as a ‘reading nation’. This book brings together leading German and Australian scholars in the fields of book history, German and Australian cultural history, Australian and postcolonial literatures, and postcolonial and cross-cultural theory, with emerging writers currently navigating between the two cultures.' (Publication summary)

‘Sweeping from Aboriginal-settler clashes to current controversies over refugees, Migrant Nation […] reveals how national identity has never been about One Australia, but always about how its peoples have dealt with One Another.’
—Craig Howes, Director, Center for Biographical Research, University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, USA

'The essays in ‘Migrant Nation: Australian Culture, Society and Identity’ work within the gap between Australian image and experience, focusing on particular historical blind spots by telling stories of individuals and groups that did not fit the favoured identity mould and can therefore offer fresh insights into the other side of identity construction. In this way this collection casts light onto the hidden face Australian identity and pays respect to the experiences of a wide variety of people who have generally been excluded, neglected or simply forgotten in the long-running quest to tell a unified story of Australian culture and identity, a story that is rapidly unravelling.

'Whether in terms of language, history, culture or personal circumstances, many of the subjects of these essays were foreign to the settler dream. The stories reveal their efforts to establish a sense of legitimacy and belonging outside of the dominant Australian story. Drawing upon memories, letters, interviews, documentary fragments and archives, the authors have in common a commitment to give life to neglected histories and thus to include, in an expanding and open-ended national narrative, people who were cast as strangers in the place that was their home.' (Publication summary)

'‘Post-Multicultural Writers as Neo-Cosmopolitan Mediators’ argues the need to move beyond the monolingual paradigm within Anglophone literary studies. Using Lyotard’s concept of post as the future anterior (back to the future), this book sets up a concept of post-multiculturalism salvaging the elements within multiculturalism that have been forgotten in its contemporary denigration. Gunew attaches this discussion to debates in neo-cosmopolitanism over the last decade, creating a framework for re-evaluating post-multicultural and Indigenous writers in settler colonies such as Canada and Australia. She links these writers with transnational writers across diasporas from Eastern Europe, South-East Asia, China and India to construct a new framework for literary and cultural studies.

'This book provides an overview of concepts in the field of literary and cultural neo-cosmopolitanism, demonstrating their usefulness in re-interpreting notions of the spatial and the temporal to create a new cultural politics and ethics that speak to our challenging times. The neo-cosmopolitan debates have shown how we are more connected than ever and how groups and geo-political areas that were overlooked in the past need to be brought to the center of our cultural criticism so that we can engage more ethically and sustainably with global cultures and languages at risk. In her wide-ranging study of world writers, Gunew juxtaposes Christos Tsiolkas, Brian Castro and Kim Scott from Australia with Canadian writers such as Shani Mootoo, Anita Rau Badami and Tomson Highway, connecting them to other Europeans such as Dubravka Ugresic and Herta Müller. [NP] This book analyses diaspora texts within neo-imperial globalization where global English often functions as metonym for Western values. By introducing the acoustic ‘noise’ of multilingualism (accents within writing) in relation to the constitutive instability within monolingual English studies, Gunew shows that within global English diverse forms of ‘englishes’ provide routes to more robust recognition of the significance of other languages that create pluralized perspectives on our social relations in the world.'  (Publication summary)

'‘Australian Theatre, Modernism and Patrick White’ details the rejection of two Patrick White plays by the Adelaide Festival of Arts in Australia in the early 1960s. In 1961 the board of governors rejected a proposal to include the world premiere of White’s first major play ‘The Ham Funeral’ for the 1962 festival. In 1963 it rejected a proposal to premiere a subsequent play ‘Night on Bald Mountain’ for the 1964 festival. These two rejections were taken up in the press where the former was referred to as the ‘affaire “Ham Funeral”’ and the latter was greeted as ‘here we go again’. ‘Australian Theatre, Modernism and Patrick White’ documents the scandal that followed the board’s rejections of White’s plays, especially as it acted against the advice of its own drama committee and artistic director on both occasions.

'Denise Varney and Sandra D’Urso analyze the two events by drawing on the performative behaviour of the board of governors to focus on the question of governance. They shed new light on the cultural politics that surrounded the rejections, arguing that it represents an instance of executive governance of cultural production, in this case theatre and performance. The governing body was a self-appointed private board comprising wealthy men, who were representative of an Adelaide establishment made up of business, farming, newspaper and military interests.

'The central argument of ‘Australian Theatre, Modernism and Patrick White’ is that aesthetic modernism in theatre and drama struggled to achieve visibility and acceptability, and was perceived as a threat to the norms and values of early to mid-twentieth-century Australia. The authors argue that when modern drama entered the stage, its preference for aesthetic experimentation over commercial considerations challenged regimes of value based on the popular appeal of musicals, touring productions and overseas imports. The resistance to that prevailing theatre culture and the provocation of Patrick White’s plays provide a prime example of Australia in transition between its colonial heritage and modern future. The 1960s set the scene for the confrontation between modernist experimentation and arts governance, and between aesthetic and commercial values.' (Publication summary)

'Thomas Keneally is known as a best-selling novelist and public figure in his Australian homeland and has also managed a transnational career. He is, however, something of a conundrum in being regularly disparaged by critics and often failing to meet expectations of sales. ‘Thomas Keneally’s Career and the Literary Machine’ explains some of the reasons behind such disparities, focusing in part on his deliberate transition from high-style modernist to ‘journeyman’ entertainer while continuing to write across both modes.

'Reactions to this shift have been framed by critical and cultural investments, and by an idea of the literary career common to both high literary and popular taste. This study examines the complex network that is a career, considering personality traits, authorial agency, agents, editors and shifts in publishing from colonial control to multinational corporations. As such, the study moves across and beyond conventional literary biography and literary history, incorporating aspects of book history and celebrity studies.

'Locating Australian Literary Memory’ explores sites which are explicitly connected with Australian authors through material forms of commemoration such as writers’ houses, graves, statues and trails. The focus is on a selected group of notable ‘heritage’ authors who have been celebrated through tangible memorials including Adam Lindsay Gordon, Henry Lawson, A. B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson, Joseph Furphy, Henry Handel Richardson, Nan Chauncy, Katharine Susannah Pritchard, Eleanor Dark and P. L Travers. Although inherited traditions have shaped local forms of literary memorialisation, some colourful, idiosyncratic rituals have evolved in the Australian context.

'Through the interweaving of Brigid Magner’s impressions of specific sites with biographical, literary and scholarly material, this book speculates on the intensities and attractions that underpin the preservation of literary places and the practices enacted within them. Key themes such as haunting, pilgrimage and nostalgia are drawn out from her discussion of these places in order to understand the fascination with literary places and the tensions and ambiguities associated with their perpetuation.

'Compared with attractions in Europe and the United States, Australian literary commemorations are relatively modest, with very few ‘grand’ houses, reflecting the impoverishment of local authors as well as a tendency to celebrate their humble origins, a literary paradigm which has been described as the 'success of failure'. The book argues that literary places – and the artefacts residing in them – often tell us more about the memorialisers, and their rituals, than the authors themselves.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'Australia has a fascinating history of visions. As the antipode to Europe, the continent has provided a radically different and uniquely fertile ground for envisioning places, spaces and societies. ‘The Antipodal Utopia’ evaluates this complex intellectual history by mapping out how Western visions of Australia evolved from antiquity to the modern period, with particular focus on the long nineteenth century. The book is underpinned by the provocative argument that due to its unique ‘antipodality’ (its antipodal relationship with Europe), Australia is imagined as a particular form of utopia – but since one person’s utopia is, more often than not, another’s dystopia, Australia’s utopian quality is both complex and highly ambiguous. Drawing on the rich field of utopian studies, ‘The Antipodal Utopia’ provides an original and insightful study of Australia’s place in the Western imagination and makes meaningful conceptual and analytical contributions to the fields of utopian theory, Australian studies and intellectual history.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'In 1955 ‘Jedda’ was released in Australian cinemas and the international film world, starring Indigenous actors Rosalie Kunoth and Robert Tudawali. That year Eric Bell watched the film in the Liberty Cinema in Yass. Twelve years later he was dismayed to read a newly erected plaque in the main street of the Yass Valley village of Bowning. It plainly stated that the Ngunnawal people, on whose country Bowning stood, had been wiped out by an epidemic of influenza. The local Shire Council was responsible for the plaque; they also employed Bell’s father. The Bells were Ngunnawal people.

'The central paradox of 'Dispossession and the Making of Jedda (1955)' is the enthusiasm of a pastoral community, made wealthy by the occupation of Ngunnawal land, for a film that addressed directly the continuing legacy of settler-colonialism, a legacy that was playing out in their own relationships with the local Ngunnawal people at the time of their investment in the film. While the local council and state government agencies collaborated to minimize the visibility of Indigenous peoples, and the memory of the colonial violence at the heart of European prosperity, a number of wealthy and high-profile members of this pastoral community actively sought involvement in a film that would bring into focus the aftermath of colonial violence, the visibility of its survivors and the tensions inherent in policies of assimilation and segregation that had characterized the treatment of Ngunnawal people in their lifetimes.

'Based on oral histories, documentary evidence, images and film, 'Dispossession and the Making of Jedda (1955)' explores the themes of colonial nostalgia, national memory and family history. Charles Chauvel’s ‘Jedda’ (1955), a shared artefact of mid-twentieth-century settler-colonialism, is its fulcrum. The book newly locates the story of the genesis of ‘Jedda’ and, in turn, ‘Jedda’ becomes a cultural context and point of reference for the history of race relations it tells.' (Publication summary)

'Colonial Australian Women Poets' examines the significant roles of five women poets: Eliza Hamilton Dunlop, Mary Bailey, Caroline Leakey, Emily Manning and Louisa Lawson. The work of these poets can outline the development of women’s poetry in Australia and internationally across the nineteenth century, and their inclusion radically alters current scholarship, rethinking the ways in which women poets, feminist politics, and the legacies of Romanticism relate to colonial poetry. Colonial poetry in Australia has generally been interpreted through a lens of oppositionality or insularity.

'Bush nationalism had come to be considered the essential ‘Australian literature’ and the colonial writings that preceded it have often been viewed as ineffectual precursors. Such masculine nationalist approaches have not acknowledged that colonial Australian women’s poetry represents an intellectually sophisticated, extensively networked and important contribution to the development of Australian poetry. Further, this poetry is often highly politically radical in ways that extend beyond emergent masculine nationalism. Australian literary studies have also typically viewed Romanticism as an absence. The gaps between the scholarship questioning the role of Romanticism in colonial Australian poetry and scholarship concerned with Australian women’s poetry produced at this time also suggests the legacy of Romantic issues around gender and political voice. These women poets were all concerned with what a feminist approach to class and all in various ways reflect ideas of both a class fall and radical social reform, closely associated with concepts of Australia’s relationship to the old world, through Romantic legacies. In positioning women poets from colonial Australia in relation to European and North American movements, this study challenges the dominant cartography of Australian literature’s relationship to Romanticism, as well as considers ways in which their inclusion re-maps Australian literary history. It foregrounds women’s contributions, particularly in assuming and mobilising a political voice, to ‘both’ a transnational Romantic tradition and what Katie Hansord terms a regional Australian Romanticism.

'The poets are examined through a transnational frame, which foregrounds challenges to women’s subjugation, as well as oppression relating to class and race. Since studies of colonial Australian women writers have tended to focus on those writing novels or journals, women’s poetry of the period has received less critical attention. The highly gender-conscious writing of these poets reflects knowledgeable and innovative political dialogues that consistently demonstrate the global context of colonial women’s poetry. These poets often took what may be considered a cosmopolitan approach, which extended beyond British or emergent Australian nationalisms, in which gender was recognised as a unifying category far more than nation or Empire, extending their interests across ancient cultures, including Greek, Roman, as well as Indian, Italian, North American, French and European cultures, and sometimes incorporating discourses around slavery, Indigeneity, and new and old-world dichotomies. These approaches were Anglophone, white and Eurocentric, but the cultural breadth of their feminist approaches often disrupts nationalist modes of thinking, and emergent Australian masculine nationalism specifically, and this is what Hansord means when she uses the term transnational in the book as a whole. Certainly, this transnational framing coincides with imperialist frames and these are operating simultaneously. In the contexts of these women’s writing, these frames are inseparable. This book is concerned with the related historical relationships of women’s political writing and gender to colonialism, literary Romanticism and emerging national identities. Themes explored in this study, demonstrating these poets’ access to a political discourse of gender and class, include abolitionism, Hellenism, eroticism and spiritualism. In prioritising the contributions of women, particularly through print culture, this study seeks to recognise colonial Australian women’s poetry as a transnational literature, politicised by its engagement with imperialist and nationalist discourses at a transnational level.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'In June 1992 the High Court of Australia ruled in favour of a claim by a group of Indigenous Australians, led by Eddie Koiki Mabo, to customary, “native title” to land. In recognising prior Indigenous occupation of the continent, the Mabo decision shook the foundations of white Australia’s belief in the legitimate settlement of the continent by the British. Indeed, more than any other event in Australia’s legal, political and cultural history, the Mabo decision challenged previous ways of thinking about land, identity, belonging, the nation and history. Now, more than a quarter of a century after Mabo, this book examines the broader impacts of this ground-breaking legal decision on Australian culture and select forms of cultural practice. If Mabo represents a “psychological” turning point (Behrendt), a “paradigm shift” (Collins and Davis) in Australian historical consciousness, if we are meant to be living in “the age of Mabo” (Attwood) or in a “post-Mabo imaginary” (Gelder and Jacobs), how is this shift or this contemporary imaginary being reflected, refracted and articulated in Australian film, fiction, poetry, biography and other forms of cultural expression? To what extent has the discussion and the practice of history, linguistics, anthropology and other branches of the humanities been challenged or transformed by Mabo? While a number of individual studies have focussed on Mabo’s impact on law, politics, film or literature, no single book provides an overview of the diverse impact and discursive influence of Mabo on various fields of artistic endeavour and cultural practice in Australia today. This book fills that gap in literary and cultural enquiry.

'In considering the cultural legacies of the High Court’s landmark decision this book also engages in a critical dialogue with Mabo and post-Mabo discourse. While a number of Indigenous Australians have benefited, legally and politically from the Mabo decision, the majority of Indigenous peoples have gained nothing, materially, from subsequent native title rulings. In honouring Eddie Mabo’s achievement, then, the contributors also recognise that Indigenous sovereignty over the continent was denied by the High Court in Mabo, and that the struggle for the recognition of better and wider land rights recognition – indeed, of First Nations sovereignty, via a treaty, treaties or similar agreements – continues ‘beyond’ Mabo. 

'Keeping such an acknowledgement of Indigenous sovereignty in mind, this interdisciplinary book offers a transnational perspective of Mabo’s cultural legacy by presenting the work of scholars based in Australia, continental Europe and the UK.'

Source : publisher's blurb

 (Publication summary)

'This book explores the history of Horwitz Publications, one of Australia’s largest post-war pulp publishers. Although best known for its cheaply produced, sometimes luridly packaged softcover books, Horwitz Publications played a far larger role in mainstream Australian publishing than has been recognised, particularly in the expansion of the paperback that took place from the late 1950s onwards.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.