AustLit

'During late summer into winter, March through July 2019, an enormous privilege befell me: I spent five months observing the astonishing wildlife of Australia to prepare to write a sequence of poems. To that end, and as an American Fulbright Senior Scholar, I was welcomed into the International Poetry Studies Institute at the University of Canberra while also — with my husband — volunteering at Tidbinbilla, that cherished nature reserve, and briefly at ACT Wildlife to help bottle-feed orphaned joeys. Elsewhere I was engaged in conversations with poets and wildlife people throughout the country, including the Outback.' (Introduction)

'In this text three emergent accomplices — Krill, Spore and Terra — give voice to the anthropoetics of time-travelling fossil-becomings. They express an ‘animistic perception’ mirroring humans’ ‘default setting’ to ‘encounter ... sensorial surroundings as a field of sensitive and sentient powers’ (Abrams 2019, n.p.). These voices without organs, arising from an alembic transcribed with arcane symbols, had been channeled by In Her Interior (IHI) through field trips, programmatic word theft and the fugue-induced sympoiesis (Dempster 2000) of collaborative writing across timespace and collective production in open systems; inviting surprise, disappointment, destabilisation, crisis, fleeting resolution and homeostasis. The iterative conditions of making were creation-destruction-crisis-creation anew. And thus the results were generative and theoretically repeatable.' (Introduction)

'This creatively-critical collaboration confronts issues of precarious employment in contemporary universities. As three early career academics currently employed on casual or fixed-term contracts in Australian universities, we have produced a writing-based fractography — a study of cracks — in order to show the effects of what Bill Readings has called ‘the ruined university’ on the bodies, minds, and lives of academic workers. To produce this work, each of us penned an individual narrative employing cracks as a metaphor for our lived experiences of working in academia. We then spliced the three separate accounts into fragments and combined them into a single text, interwoven with quotations from published sources. The quoted materials set the personal against the political, showing how our individual and particular experiences reflect specific but non-isolated instances of a much bigger, shared problem. Our polyvocal collaboration thus forms an instance of what Drager Meurtant describes in terms of ‘artistic assemblage’. In line with Cathryn Perazzo and Patrick West, we engage this approach in order to affect ‘non-didactic didacticism’ in our critique of the socio-political problems rife throughout academia today.' (Publication abstract)

'Alongside the disruptions caused by the spread of COVID-19 we have heard discourses reflect the theme of normality. Preventative measures employed to ‘flatten the curve’ and stop the spread of disease are often spoken of as creating a temporary ‘new norm’, while a post-COVID-19 world is seen as marking a return to ‘normality’. Positioned within a context defined by heightened uncertainty, anxiety and an urgency to respond to arising health, economic, and other social crises, in this paper we consider what a pre-COVID-19 normal means for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and whether it is something we aspire to return to. Unpacking topics relating to Black deaths in custody and the Black Lives Matter movement we consider the systemic failure of dominant White systems of governance that continuously prove themselves incapable of addressing and responding to the Indigenous voices they claim to represent. Throughout our paper we encourage a deeper consideration of the need to create to a lasting new norm that protects, is informed by, represents, and directly involves Indigenous peoples and their representative bodies. Exemplified by the Uluru Statement from the Heart, we argue that a new norm — which is not characterised by Indigenous socio-economic disadvantages and disparities between Indigenous and non-Indigenous populations — must be one where an Indigenous voice is enshrined within the parliamentary process. A new norm must build on the foundation created by the countless Indigenous activists, past and present, who have laid the tracks leading towards meaningful reforms that engages Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. No longer are tokenistic or symbolic gestures of recognition acceptable. The time for a new normal is now.' (Publication abstract)

'When thinking about the focus of this issue of Axon on ‘natural, environmental and epidemiological disasters’ it would be hard to go past COVID-19, not only because of its topicality but because it fits all three adjectives. The possible exception is ‘environmental’: while the virus is a feature of the very air we breathe, in many parts of the world it has reduced air pollution and opened up previously prohibited spaces to the animal kingdom. Monkeys run amok in Thai towns, dolphins leap higher than normal in the ship-free Mediterranean around Malta. For almost anyone alive today the virological crisis is the most extraordinary experience of their lives — arguably more threatening than any of the wars with which it is analogised.' (Introduction)