AustLit

'This chapter looks at the work of the contemporary Noongar writer Kim Scott, focusing both on its portrayal of his family history and the history of Indigenous settler contact in Western Australia. It emphasizes the importance of the university as a context for Scott’s historical fiction, focusing on creative-writing programs and practice-led research. It demonstrates how the rise of “the doctoral novel” plays a vital role in a more plural and more just model of literary engagement.' (Publication abstract)

'Gerald Murnane’s meticulously self-curated ‘Chronological Archive’ – as distinct from his ‘Literary Archive’ and ‘Antipodean Archive’, both of which he likewise compiled – fills no fewer than ‘twenty-one of the twenty-four drawers in six steel filing cabinets’. ‘In each drawer’, his catalogue stipulates, ‘at least twenty coloured signposts draw attention to items of more than usual interest’. A list of more than a hundred of these signposts follows. None of the items identified will be available for consultation until after the death of the author and his siblings. Murnane’s decision to announce his archive’s contents seems therefore premature, at least until one notices that this choice is clearly of a piece with the grand legacy-securing undertaking that is his curation of the archive itself: the catalogue’s promise that it contains much ‘humour and literary gossip’ is tacitly underwritten by its pre-emptive publication, which for all its idiosyncrasy functions primarily as an invitation to further discussion of its author.' (Introduction)