AustLit
Latest Issues
Notes
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Contents indexed selectively.
Contents
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Re-Reading the Australian Imaginary,
single work
criticism
'The re-release of Ted Kotcheff's 1971 film Wake in Fright was a highlight of the 2009 Sydney International Film Festival. The film had been 'lost' for decades but in the early twenty-first century, members of the original production team began searching for surviving copies. In one of those truth as stranger than fiction turns, a copy was found in a vault in Pittsburgh 'marked for destruction and imminent disposal'. Dedicated collaborative work between film technicians, digital experts, sound engineers and film archivists meant a restored version was produced and screened at Cannes and Sydney in mid-2009. Almost forty years after the original film had opened in Sydney, Paris and London, it resurfaced to much acclaim...The re-released version of Wake in Fright re-envisions Australia for a new generation of viewers. Though it was made decades ago, to watch it today is to engage with new ways of understanding Australian-ness. The shifts in cultural norms around attitudes to the environment, to Indigenous rights and culture, to gender relations, sexual relations, and taboos and prejudices, mean that the same scenes shot in Broken Hill in 1970 resonate in both familiar and alien ways.' (p. 388)
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A Challenging Vision : The Teacher-Student Relationship in The Heartbreak Kid,
single work
criticism
'This article revisits the 1993 Australian feature film The Heartbreak Kid, in order to examine three unexplored and interconnecting facets: the representation of the female teacher as object of desire; the classroom as an erotically charged arena; and the outcome of the sexual relationship between the protagonists, the young teacher, Christina Papadopoulos, and her seventeen-year-old male student, Nick Polides. The discussion draws on a recent analysis of a similar real life case, in order to show how the film advances a different reading than the current laws encompass. In showing the student's considerable agency in the affair, and in not criminalising the teacher's unethical behaviour towards him, the film contradicts the outcomes of the real case in 2004.' (p. 405)
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Spun from Four Horizons : Re-Writing the Sydney Harbour Bridge,
single work
criticism
'The Sydney Harbour Bridge provides an imaginative space that is revisited by Australian writers in particular ways. In this space, novelists, poets, and cultural historians negotiate questions of emotional and psychological transformation as well as reflect on social and environmental change in the city of Sydney. The writerly tensions that mark these accounts often alter, or query, representations of the Bridge as a symbol of material progress and demonstrate a complex creative engagement with the Bridge. This discussion of 'the Bridge' focuses on the work of four authors, Eleanor Dark, P.R. Stephensen, Peter Carey and Vicki Hastrich and includes a range of other fictional and non-fictional accounts of 'Bridge-writing.' The ideas proffered are framed by a theorising of space, especially referencing the work of Michel de Certeau, whose writing on the spatial ambiguity of a bridge is important to the examination of the diverse ways in which Australian writers have engaged with the imaginative potential and almost mythic resonance of the Sydney Harbour Bridge.' (p. 417)
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'When Everything Old is New Again' : Class, Consumerism and Masculinity in Alasdair Duncan's Metro,
single work
criticism
'Alasdair Duncan's narrative Metro, set in Brisbane in the early twenty-first century, focuses on Liam, an unapologetically self-styled white 'upper middle-class brat' whose sense of place and identity is firmly mapped by spatial and economic co-ordinates. This article considers the linkages between spatiality and identity in Duncan's narrative, as well as the ways in which traditional, hegemonic (heterosexual) forms of masculinity are re-invigorated in the enactment of an upper middle-class script of success, privilege and consumerism. It argues that the safeguarding of these hegemonic forms of masculine identity involves strategies of spatial and bodily expression underpinned by conspicuous consumption, relegating other forms of sexual identity to an exploitable periphery. (p. 431)
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The Citation of Injury : Regarding the Exceptional Body,
single work
criticism
'Australia's instrumentalisation of non-citizen bodies via the practice of extrajudicial immigration detention produces a context for abjection in the form of hunger strikes and self-mutilation. This article examines the representation of these self-injuries in the poems 'Asylum' by Mehmet al Assad (2002) and 'Make a whistle from my throat' by an anonymous Baxter detainee (2005); Shahin Shafaei's solo play Refugitive (2002-04); solidarity fasts by Australian activists (2002-04); and Mike Parr's performance installation Close the Concentration Camps (2002). While presenting Australian audiences with the possibility for imaginative encounter with injured bodies that seem immutably 'other', these works also offer something more troubling, but potentially transforming: a context for recognition of proximity (both ethical and political) to the sovereign-produced position of exception.' (p. 459)
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Untitled,
single work
review
— Review of Friendly Mission : The Tasmanian Journals and Papers of George Augustus Robinson, 1829-1834 1966 selected work diary ; Reading Robinson : Companion Essays to 'Friendly Mission' 2008 anthology criticism ; (p. 491-492) -
Untitled,
single work
review
— Review of Ned Kelly : Icon of Modern Culture 2008 single work biography ; (p. 493-495) -
Untitled,
single work
review
— Review of Writing Never Arrives Naked : Early Aboriginal Cultures of Writing in Australia 2006 single work criticism ; (p. 498-499) -
Untitled,
single work
review
— Review of Enid Lyons : Leading Lady to a Nation 2008 single work biography ; (p. 502-504)