AustLit

'This article analyses the Australian lesbian sex magazines, Wicked Women (1988-1996) and Slit (2002-) to examine the nature and shape of Australian lesbian pornography magazines, and hence to explore the ways in which these publications put pornography in the service of lesbians. I outline the conditions of these magazines' emergence, and then discuss the representational strategies of each, including imagery, layout, tropes and narratives. These magazines and their changing modes of making lesbian porn, show the development of a lesbian porn aesthetic. Further, they offer a unique sight of the discursive construction of lesbian identities and communities across more than three decades, and reveal another facet of the troubled relationship between feminism and lesbians.' (Author's abstract 159)

'Former print and television journalist Di Morrissey is Australia's biggest-selling writer of popular fiction. Her novels incrementally construct an Australia re-shaped for the new century through the interplay of significant social forces and demographic shifts. Her imaginary also places Australian culture within a global network of affiliations generated by the colonial and imperial past, as well as by more recent strategic alliances, and encompasses some of the darker elements of Australia's collective inheritance. The critical reception of Morrissey's work, however, has hitherto been scant and dismissive. Yet the Pacific Rim novels - Tears of the Moon, Scatter the Stars, Kimberley Sun, Monsoon, and The Plantation - can be read within perspectives afforded by dark tourism research and theories of cognitive dissonance, revealing that they subvert widely received understandings of Australia's relationships within the Pacific region and constitute a subliminal force for public education.' (Author's abstract 211)