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'The Lives of Others is concerned with the debts and obligations that accompany the passing of the generations. “For no one bears this life alone” is how Hölderlin describes the mutuality that binds us to our forebears. Each of the contributors to this issue of Southerly endeavours to understand the ways in which this mutuality guides out actions and behaviours. What forms of writing and memorialisation can assist us to acknowledge the unfinished nature of the relationships that link the present to the past, the living to the dead? Is there a way to answer the phantom’s call yet keep faith with those secrets that have made their home in us?' (Introduction)
Contents
- Anywhere but Here, single work short story
- My Spine, Your Pillowi"When the sun sets and everything is cellophane", single work poetry
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Kathleen Davidson Reviews ‘Falling Backwards’ by Jo Jones,
single work
review
— Review of Falling Backwards : Australian Historical Fiction and The History Wars 2018 multi chapter work criticism ;'Jo Jones’s Falling Backwards is balanced on the notion that “Some stories are hard to tell.” The question of how best to engage with this trauma—how to look back, openly and sensitively, into the darkness of Australia’s colonial past—is at the heart of her volume. The titular image of falling backwards gestures towards this work’s primary insight. Falling is usually an involuntary act. Yet, in acknowledging that we must tumble loose from our present assumptions, we might open ourselves up to a productive disorientation. This process allows ideas about self and other, belonging and identity, to shift and emerge anew. Ultimately, Falling Backwards is a thoughtful analysis of the politics of literary form in contemporary historical fiction. Jones does not object to realism per se, but to the ethical compromises that can occur when this classically linear, unified and self-affirming mode is applied to the representation of a positivistically unknowable past. ' (Introduction)
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Nicholas Birns Reviews ‘Australian Books and Others in the American Marketplace’ by David Carter and Roger Osborne,
single work
review
'David Carter and Roger Osborne’s volume looks at publishing history as a form of literary history. The authors’ proficiency in the archive and their thoroughness of research tells a story of both the splendors and, far more, the miseries of the reception of Australian books in the United States.' (Introduction)
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A Breeze Blows, or It Doesn’t Blow: History’s Beckonings,
single work
essay
'I wanted it to be true. I wanted it to be true because it was there in the primary sources. It was there in the journals and the biographies: slaves bought and sold in India, in Arabia. The trans-Indian Ocean slave trade and the slave trade within India that passed by other names. Black men bought and sold them. Brown men bought and sold them. White men were sometimes good to do business with. Governor Lachlan Macquarie bought two of them. He says so himself. All the biographers have tracked this down. Centuries pass. The memory of slavery chooses its own path and changes form with every age. My friend in Kochi says slavery ended when the Dutch period ended. The British freed all the slaves. It’s a factual flaw, he says, in response to my enquiry about the slave trade in 1795. As for Lachlan Macquarie, a man who would be Governor, he knew what he was doing.' (Introduction)
Publication Details of Only Known VersionEarliest 2 Known Versions of
Related Works
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y
Southerly
The Lives of Others
vol.
78
no.
2
2018
16854409
2018
periodical issue
“Doesn’t a breath of the air that pervaded earlier days caress us as well? in the voices we hear, isn’t there an echo of now silent ones? ... if so, then there is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Then our coming was expected on earth” (Benjamin 390). What does it mean to be in secret agreement with people and places that came before? To recognise that coming after is a matter not just of influence, but also the taking on of certain obligations—for example, to return, to pay tribute, to make amends, to put to rest? for Walter Benjamin the challenge in writing about the past is not to achieve a faithful reconstruction of an earlier period. it is to grasp moments of correspondence between the past and the present that otherwise would fall prey to the ever-present forces of amnesia. nowhere is the call of Southerly this precarious correspondence more acutely registered than in writings and forms of creative practice that are located in the movement between one generation and the next. it is here that remembrance comes face to face with the unfinished business of people, places and events that demand some-thing of us.
