AustLit

'For years the poet Anne Elder (1918–1976) was best known for the Anne Elder Award, a prominent literary prize for a first book of poems (similar in prestige to the Yale Younger Poets Prize in the United States). That obscuration of the poet herself has changed of late, with her inclusion in poetry anthologies (by Puncher and Wattmann and the University of New South Wales Press) and particularly with the joint publication in 2018 of a new selection of her poems, The Bright and the Cold (edited by her daughter, Catherine Elder), and a biography, The Heart's Ground (by Julia Hamer). Anne Elder's first career was as a ballet dancer in the Borovansky Company in Melbourne, but her debut collection of poems, For the Record (1972), marked her immediately as a poet of distinction. After her early death, a posthumous volume was published by Angus and Robertson, Crazy Woman and Other Poems (1977), though plans for a collected poems never materialized.' (Introduction)

'This essay situates the recent return to referentiality and authenticity in contemporary historical fiction in the context of the current climate of global literary culture, which is concerned with ideas of identity, positionality, proximity, and authenticity. This return is guided by a refreshed ethics of literary production, a renewed sense of moral obligation to represent the past truthfully and earnestly, while maintaining postmodernism's skepticism toward the production and construction of historical narratives. Some contemporary historical novels have (re)assumed the responsibility of demonstrating to the general reading public how histories are written and, by extension, propose an ethical and critical engagement with the past that aligns with the shift in political and cultural sensibilities we have witnessed over the past decade. The case study in this essay is A Room Made of Leaves (2020) by Kate Grenville, a critically acclaimed Australian historical novelist.' (Publication abstract)

'Donna Coates is an associate professor at the University of Calgary, is a long-term member of the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies, and has served on the editorial board of Antipodes. She has published many articles on the topic of war, especially women in war, a field that she pioneered in the national literatures of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. She has taught and lectured frequently world-wide and has visited Australia many times. Donna also serves as the primary editor of the seven-volume Women and War (History of Feminism) series published by Routledge in 2020 and edited Sharon Pollock: First Woman of Canadian Theatre, published in 2015 with the University of Calgary Press. She coedited Canada and the Theatre of War, volume 1 (2008) and volume 2 (2010), with Sherrill Grace. Her publications also include two books coauthored with George Melnyk: Wild Words: Essays on Alberta Literature (2009) and Writing Alberta: Building on a Literature Identity (2017). Donna is currently completing a book on Australian women's war fictions.' (Introduction)

'In keeping with Antipodes's focus on literary and other cultural texts from the Pacific region, this special section features six new essays on Australian and New Zealand fictional feature and documentary films. While Australian and Aotearoa/New Zealand are separate and distinct national cinemas, this section's coverage of narrative films from both nations reflects a tradition of scholarship based on the significant cultural crossovers between them. Beyond the nations' common origins as former British colonies and their Pacific location, Australian and New Zealand filmmakers have both drawn on their respective settler histories and postsettler social development as multicultural nations for narrative subjects and inspiration. Ian Conrich has noted that "Australian and New Zealand cinema share a use of powerful landscapes, they also share a post-settler Gothic, a cinema of isolation and travel, similar screen representations of masculinity, and similar fictional depictions of small-town communities" (5). An expanded list of commonalities includes the important rise since the early 2000s of Indigenous film and filmmakers in Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand alike, which Felicity Collins, Jane Landman, and Susan Bye called in A Companion to Australian Cinema (2019) a necessary challenge to the previously dominant "uninterrupted whiteness of Australian screen culture" (37).' (Introduction)

'In 2020, FREEMAN became the most-watched documentary in Australia. This article situates the film's intercultural, multivocal, and multiperspectival story of Cathy Freeman's gold-medal win at the Sydney 2000 Olympics in three contemporary contexts: the Trailblazers collection of sports documentaries that entertained Australians during COVID-19 lockdowns; the Black Lives Matter protests in Australia cities and towns that defied COVID- 19 bans in 2020 and provided a context for remembering Cathy Freeman as a Black activist in the 1990s; and a First Nations context that recognizes Freeman as a Kuku Yalanji woman whose public roles have helped to transform the terms of stranger relationality between Indigenous, settler-colonial, and immigrant Australians.' (Publication abstract)

'The East Alligator River snakes through high spear grass, open eucalypt woodlands, and paperbark forests to the tidal flats, where pandanus palms dig their roots in the mud. A nomination error: there were and are no alligators, only saltwater crocodiles. They cruise alongside our boat or laze around in the sun on mud flats.' (Introduction)