AustLit
Latest Issues
Contents
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Sure Ground,
single work
essay
'There is an activity I run with my students in the first class of semester. I tell them I’m going to play a video and want them to give me their impressions. How does it make you feel? Do you like it? Do you hate it? Are you without emotion? Then, I explain, I will reveal something about the video’s making and ask how this new information changes their impressions. Then, I divulge more of the video’s context, and ask once more for their responses.'
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Storying the Suffragists,
single work
review
— Review of Vida : A Woman for Our Time 2020 single work biography ;'There’s a story that keeps being told. It goes like this: it’s 1902, and the inaugural International Woman Suffrage Conference has drawn women from around the world to Washington, DC. It’s a historic meeting of nations, and the star of the show is a willowy 33-year-old from Melbourne. Her name is Vida Goldstein and she’s there to represent Australia and New Zealand, two nations riding high on their trailblazing political achievements. New Zealand gave women the vote in 1893, South Australia in 1894, Western Australia in 1899. Now, in 1902, the new Commonwealth of Australia is about to grant white women the right to vote and stand for federal parliament – a world first. The two British settler colonies are leading the world in democratic innovation and women’s rights.' -
Rebel Bodies,
single work
review
— Review of Show Me Where It Hurts : Living With Invisible Illness 2020 single work autobiography ; Hysteria 2020 single work autobiography ;'In my early years as an undergraduate, I sat in a lecture theatre for one of many courses on women’s writing. I was a naïve deaf girl from the country and these classes set my mind fizzing. That mild, autumnal morning, I sat up straight, waiting for the lecture to start. The lesson that came, with my lecturer’s dry humour, was about the wandering womb – the notion that women’s hysteria was caused by a womb that detached and moved around the body. Its history stretches back to the Eber Papyrus, an Egyptian medical record from around 1600 BCE, which explains that to ‘cure’ a patient, the uterus needed to be lured back to its rightful place through the administration of pleasant smells near the vagina, or feral smells near the head, forcing it down. In ancient Greek, womb and word were yoked – the Greek word for ‘uterus’ is hystera – and Greek physician Hippocrites first used the term ‘hysteria’ in the fifth century BCE. He suggested that the sexually frustrated uterus caused symptoms of anxiety and suffocation, while another physician, Aretaeus, described the womb as ‘an animal within an animal’. To marginalise women – particularly recalcitrant women – these physicians deemed their bodies faulty, unreliable and irrational, and set up a contrast to their coherent male counterparts. In my lecture, I snorted with disbelief at such absurd ideas and assumed they remained in history books, like dust bunnies behind a bathroom door.' -
'Living on Stolen Land' : Deconstructing the Settler Mythscape,
single work
review
— Review of Living on Stolen Land 2020 selected work poetry prose ; -
Performance,
single work
essay
'My mother was a piano prodigy. She started playing as a child in Vietnam, and by the time she was a teenager, she was giving concerts. That’s how she met my father – he was in the audience watching her perform, and by the end of it, he had to know this girl. It was the early 1970s, not long before he went to war.' (Introduction)
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Catalytic Threads,
single work
essay
'Ordinary matter is what we are made of – everything we can see or detect with telescopes or microscopes or our own eyes. Such a wide descriptive ambit makes it an apposite title for this second collection of fiction by Brisbane-based Laura Elvery, which ranges far and wide, across decades and geographical spaces, and occupies the nexus between arts and science, writing and innovation.' (Introduction)
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In the Catalogue,
single work
essay
'At my desk in the Mitchell Library Reading Room I picked out a small cardboard folder from the pile of books and boxes beside me. Opening it I carefully removed a thin envelope, an item I had been curious to inspect after finding it listed in the library catalogue. ‘The ‘invisible hair net’: fully sterilized / made expressly for David Jones Sydney’, was, according to the catalogue summary, a ‘Specimen of a hair net packaged in an envelope. The packaging includes a black and white illustration of a woman with styled hair, presumably the result of wearing the invisible hair net.’' (Introduction)
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Australia’s Plague Archive,
single work
essay
'Australia has a long history of epidemics. In 1983, Noel Butlin went so far as to argue that colonial Australia was constituted on the consequences of epidemic. Butlin was referring to smallpox, which had catastrophic consequences when encountered on the east coast by Indigenous Australians with limited or no herd immunity. This was ‘our original aggression’. Australia’s history prior to the twentieth century is punctuated by the introduction of diseases which took a heavy toll, especially on vulnerable segments of the population. Until the years after World War Two, infectious diseases were commonplace in a way that has generally been forgotten in the sanitised and healthy twenty-first century.' (Introduction)
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A Dream Walking,
single work
review
— Review of Mysteries of Cinema : Reflections on Film Theory, History and Culture 2018 multi chapter work criticism ;'On and off for many years, the Australian film critic Adrian Martin has kept a dream diary; he mentions it occasionally in his writings, always with the implication that films and dreams aren’t so far apart.' (Introduction) -
Skin Hunger,
single work
essay
'For two years, I kept track of how many days it had been since we’d last had sex. If it had been more than seven days, I told myself I had to put out. If it had been one or two, my body was my own. The first time I realised this was not normal was when I posted about it on Facebook.' (Introduction)
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Archives of Loss : Prithvi Varatharajan on Living with the Anthropocene,
single work
review
— Review of Living with the Anthropocene 2020 anthology essay prose ;
