AustLit

'The Heide Museum's 2011 exhibition Born to Concrete offered a rare opportunity to survey the history of visual poetry—a "hybrid genre … in which linguistic structures support pictorial structures and vice versa"—in Australia from the late 1960s onward (Bohn 100). It included a range of mixed and multimedia pieces, including typewritten texts, collages, prints, sculptures, and found objects, and it featured such figures as Ruth Cowen, Aleks Danko, Jas H. Duke, Peter Murphy, ΠO, Alan Riddell, Alex Selenitsch, and Richard Tipping.' (Introduction)

'This article considers the linguistic structures of Lionel G. Fogarty's poetry as consciously reflecting processes of language acquisition and relexification and posits the speaking subject as a condition of forced transculturation. Utilizing Fogarty's "Disguised, not attitude" and "Bam Gayandi" as primary examples, I will seek to substantiate an argument that the "forced poetics" of Fogarty's poetic historicity is made manifest through an intermediated subject. As I conceive of it, the intermediary subject is one in which poetic intelligence is split between the aggressively interiorized and the distant other of the self (Sutherland, "Blocks" 00:22:00–00:24:00). This subjective identity is structured on Australian Indigenous culture and history, including "archives of character, genealogies of cultural memory, [and] histories of the present" (Minter 259) in which identity is latently or implicitly conceived. As Fogarty writes across and outside national traditions, linguistic disobedience is expressed through the embedding of Indigenous languages and language systems within poems ostensibly written in English. While emphasizing diverging and often conflicting energies within the poetics, these linguistic features of his work are often critically analyzed via notions of contrariety, without critics giving due consideration to processes through which asymmetries in cultural, linguistic, and ethnic exchange are foregrounded. The contention that this essay will advance is that the expression within Fogarty's poetics bears witness to and records the events and processes of "forced transculturation," functioning within the parameters of a linguistically experimental literature.' (Introduction)

'Though previous scholarship into alternate history narratives has been conducted, to date a set of "poetics" that defines this genre has not yet been developed (Chapman and Yoke 21). Indeed, there is a significant gap in knowledge regarding the alternate history genre; a collection of papers appearing in Classic and Iconoclastic Alternate History Science Fiction, edited by Edgar L. Chapman and Carl B. Yoke, identify this gap: "For while numerous alternate history tales have now been written, … no comprehensive poetics of this genre … has been developed" (21). This article seeks to address part of this gap by first coining a new term for the genre (Uchronic fiction) and by using two examples of alternate history narratives unique and particular to Australia (John Hooker's The Bush Soldiers and John A. Scott's N) to highlight some of the hitherto undefined "poetics" for this genre as they appear in these two examples of Uchronic fiction. These two novels also bring to the fore serious issues that are relevant to the discussion regarding the political agenda on the part of authors John Hooker and John A. Scott, both of whom do not shy away from addressing white Australia's historically poor treatment of Aboriginal people or from Australia's historical ambivalence and hostility toward nonwhite immigrants and people from Asia.' (Introduction)

'Letty Fox: Her Luck was Christina Stead's sixth novel. It was published in October 1946, a year after the end of World War II. It is set in Manhattan and was largely written there (Rowley 246, 282). Stead had come to New York not from Sydney, her home city, but via England and continental Europe, where she had lived with her longtime partner (and later husband), William Blake. Blake was a Jewish American broker, economist, and writer, and Hitler's pursuit of Lebensraum had persuaded the couple to quit the continent for the United States. As confirmed Europhiles, they found the adjustment difficult at times. Both Stead and Blake made sporadic forays away from the city in search of work, trying their hands at screenwriting for MGM in California, for example, and writing applications for Guggenheim grants (Rowley 267). Stead also taught courses on the novel at New York University.' (Introduction)

'Land theft, language suppression, cultural genocide. These forms of abuse are the historical background that feature in the story of Taboo, the latest work of fiction by the writer Kim Scott. Taboo is a story of trauma, decolonization, and healing. The main character, Tilly Coolman, must reconcile her recent discovery about her Noongar Aboriginal roots as she meets her biological father and his family, along with healing from horrific abuse from the people closest to her. Additionally, the novel draws attention to the descendants of white settlers who attempt to address their own culpability. The novel centers around the creation of a "Peace Park" being set up near the site of a massacre in order to bring reconciliation between the Wirlomin Noongar and the white population of the area. The story of Tilly, whose heritage is of mixed Wirlomin Noongar heritage, reflects a long history of abuse suffered by the Aboriginal peoples of Australia and by many indigenous groups from colonized countries worldwide.' (Introduction)

'Opening Charlotte Wood's fifth novel, The Natural Way of Things, is like waking up in hell. Ten women have been drugged, kidnapped, hauled out to the middle of nowhere, and imprisoned in a former sheep station with three hired keepers. Almost immediately the women recognize each other from news coverage and piece together the sole link between them: that each has been involved in some kind of sex scandal, and now each has been carefully "disappeared," although the details of the operation—how it was coordinated and funded, why they were selected, and who planned the whole [End Page 318] thing—remain mysterious. Two-thirds of the way through the novel, there is a very short segment in which someone wonders what people would make of their absence: "Would it be said, they 'disappeared,' 'were lost'? Would it be said they were abandoned or taken, the way people said a girl was attacked, a woman was raped, this femaleness always at the center, as if womanhood itself were the cause of these things?" (133). But those questions quickly fade again into the background, and it begins to look like this novel is not exactly a feminist cautionary fable along the lines of The Handmaid's Tale. We never learn anything about the politics or motives of the cabal that so efficiently engineers this mass kidnapping. Certainly there is a running critique of routine Australian sexism; Wood is particularly keen to show us how sexist attitudes have been assimilated by the ten victims, to varying degrees. But the focus of the novel is less political than primordial. This is a kind of prison experiment, the jailers trapped inside with the prisoners, and everyone driven or reduced to something less than fully human. Or perhaps we were never as human as we thought?' (Introduction)

'Kif Kehlmann can encapsulate his life in a few phrases: married to Suzy, a devoted wife, with a preschool daughter and twins soon to arrive; living a modest life in Hobart (modest home, twenty-year-old car, serviceable clothing); working as a part-time doorman (and taking on odd jobs as they arise); and writing a novel—a literary one. His wife professes unflinching belief in him, convinced that Kif will produce a book that will earn him celebrity and them a life unconstrained by material want.' (Introduction)

'In Robert Drewe's newest novel, Whipbird, disparate branches of the Cleary family tree gather for a weekend to celebrate both the 160th anniversary of their ancestor's arrival in Australia and the opening of Hugh Cleary's titular Whipbird vineyard. (In an early bit of humor, we learn the reason Hugh has chosen the 160th rather than the more recognizably significant 150th anniversary is that ten years earlier, everyone forgot.) In a suave satiric critique of the public's willful historical ignorance, Drewe shows guests amusingly unimpressed to learn that their ancestor Conor Cleary played a role in the 1854 miners' uprising at the Eureka Stockade, an event that is also celebrating its 160th anniversary: "Some of the adults recalled a school history lesson on Australia's small, swift civil war…. Who could remember the date involved when there wasn't even a public holiday for it?" (72). Hugh himself seems comically oblivious that their ancestor was a soldier (fighting on the side of the British) and not a miner.' (Introduction)

'Michael Wilding's latest mystery novel, In the Valley of the Weed, is a strange, almost sinister book. It begins with disarming straightforwardness: an oddball PI named Plant is roused from his usual state of inertia to investigate the disappearance of a local professor whose politically incorrect email correspondence recently made national news. From the first, Wilding's knack for fluid dialogue and his confident, breezy style make the pages turn as quickly as any mystery fan could hope for. Before long, however, Wilding's conspicuous lack of interest in following the conventional rhythms of a satisfying whodunit cannot be ignored. Well before Weed's pointedly cryptic anticlimax, its persistent subversion of familiar tropes makes Wilding's true purpose clear: not to craft a good mystery but to deliberately deconstruct the form. And that's fine. To wed a given genre to postmodern theory is maybe not the freshest idea out there—few minds remain to be blown, one assumes, by the idea that a mystery's narrative dynamics change if its author does not include a concrete solution—but not every novelist can pull off an academic switcheroo quite this bold and still hold readers' interest until the end. For that success, if no other, Wilding is to be commended.' (Introduction)

'The scorpion needs to cross the river. He watches the boy's eyes as he scurries onto the quivering chest. I need to be brave enough not to sting. The water flows over the boy's chest and touches the scorpion's feet. The fear causes a reaction, and the tail pierces the chest. In this instant, he knows that he will drown, he knows the pain he is causing the boy, but the reaction is familiar; the fear has made him feel there is no other way. In Paul Mitchell's debut novel, We. Are. Family., masculinity is laid bare. Three generations of the Stevenson family are crippled by the pretense of appearing strong. Familiar equilibrium is punctuated by trauma. We see the scorpion's tail pierce the boy's chest to deliver the poison; we feel the father's eyes want his sons to have fun fishing because as males, the challenge of knots and poles and the silence of water has to give us a chance to feel our souls. The bold title is absolutely perfect. In my California surfer dialect, THIS! BOOK! ROCKS!' (Introduction)