AustLit

'From her first novel, The Morality of Gentlemen (1984), Amanda Lohrey represented a unique, intriguing, and necessary voice in Australian literature. As Julieanne Lamond’s study Lohrey traces, she was both part of but distinct from the 1980s boom in Australian women’s writing and has gone on to produce a diverse oeuvre of novels, short stories, journalism, and nonfiction that captures late twentieth and early twenty-first century Australian life – texts that ‘chronicle the forces that shape intimate and social experience in the contemporary world’ (Lamond 1). Surprisingly, Lohrey’s work has received comparatively scant critical attention, with much of it focused on the controversial pulping of The Reading Group in 1989, making this first monograph on Lohrey a welcome and much needed addition to Australian literary studies and studies of contemporary women writers.' (Introduction)

'Lionel Fogarty’s difficult, urgent verse is universally accepted as an ‘activist poetry’, yet the very axiomatic nature of this characterisation has ironically obviated critical engagement with Fogarty’s experimentalist poetry as it emerges from specific protest – as a response to, and analysis of, the particular, contemporaneous, shifting injustices faced by Aboriginal people. Proposing to bring the interpretative frame of activism to bear anew upon Fogarty’s work, this essay reads Fogarty’s ‘No Cites like the Cites Hum In’ (‘Written Land’ 2016) as a timely language of judicial and poetic intervention – one itself seeking to intervene on another, restless language of intervention – that of settler lawmaking. It considers how Fogarty’s poem enacts a ‘decolonisative’ critique of the settler poeticisation of toil operationalised by Fortescue Mining Group CEO Andrew Forrest in his 2014 report on Indigenous employment and training programs, ‘Creating Parity’. Fogarty’s poem, it argues, reckons with the centrality of a ‘battlerist’ mythos to the settler-state’s specific, contemporary, neoliberal efforts to not only expropriate Aboriginal land, but also to discipline and pathologise Aboriginal bodies. This essay demonstrates how ‘No Cites like the Cites Hum In’ provides a poignant analysis of the way settler law, time and labour regimes function together to desiccate and enervate the distinct temporal subjectivities underpinning Aboriginal political imaginaries. It contends that a stronger poetic and philosophical appreciation of Fogarty’s verse is gained from understanding it in its relation to extraliterary Aboriginal struggles.' (Introduction)

'Many literary sources have been suggested for Patrick White’s fifth novel, Voss, ranging from the surreal symbolism of Rimbaud’s poetry, to T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets. White himself explicitly acknowledged the influence of two works by Australian women writers in his depiction of colonial society: Ruth Bedford’s family history, Think of Stephen: A Family Chronicle (1954), and M. Barnard Eldershaw’s prizewinning novel A House is Built (1929). Bedford, a granddaughter of Sir Alfred Stephen, Chief Justice of New South Wales from 1844 to 1873, drew on family papers to give a detailed account of the social life of the elite of Sydney from the 1840s to 1880s, commenting on the demands of household management on the women as well as describing picnics, balls, and dinners. Barnard Eldershaw absorbed references to historical events such as the gold rushes and Sydney landmarks like the convict-built Barracks and St Andrew’s Cathedral into their novel. They provide ample detail of architecture, furniture, and clothing in descriptions of the social and domestic life of the Hyde family and associates: sewing, paying formal calls, hosting dinners, concert- and theatregoing. There are resemblances with Voss’s Bonner family, including structural similarities in the contrast of the two principal female characters and their fates. This discussion traces the influence of these works of Bedford and Barnard Eldershaw in Voss.' (Publication abstract)   

'In this article, I ask how the British nuclear humanities, and in particular literary studies, might turn towards Indigenous Australian artistic, literary and critical work on nuclear legacies. Reading responses to the afterlives of British nuclear operations at Maralinga by the activist-poet Dr Natalie Harkin (Narungga) and the artist Yhonnie Scarce (Kokatha / Nukunu), I consider how, for British scholars, interpreting Aboriginal nuclear texts asks particular questions of critical practice, drawing attention to empire’s intellectual, as well as social and chemical, residues. Such work invites a reflexive critical approach, attentive to what feminist and Indigenous scholars call ‘positionality’. In Britain, the places blasted and irradiated in the name of national defence have a vague, occluded presence in collective memory. This inhibited awareness of nuclear history, I suggest, has been shaped both by avoidant attitudes to empire, and also by strongly future-oriented nuclear imaginaries. By contrast, Harkin and Scarce draw attention to intimate, ongoing encounters with toxic legacies left by imperial and settler-colonial projects. As they celebrate the resilience of dispossessed, poisoned communities for whom nuclear apocalypse is an everyday reality, they emphasise interrelated forms of responsibility: to the past, to land, and to future generations. I discuss the important challenges that their art and activism present to mainstream nuclear cultures, and to the memory of empire in Britain.'  (Publication abstract) 

'This article argues that salt functions as a transformative marking and shaping agent in Tim Winton’s work. Salt scars both people and place (externally and internally, physically and spiritually) while also signifying sanctuary (both a refuge and a holy space). Salt leaves both subtle and obvious imprints on the landscape, the built environment, and on minor and major characters in Winton’s novels and non-fiction. Winton scripts material and psychological salt scars that result from discomfort and danger, and which foster healing and/or peace for his characters. Landscape salt in Winton’s works also generates spaces that are protective for his characters, whose situations tend to be so precarious and so isolated. Most remarkably, however, landscape salt amplifies the sacredness of these ‘thin and bitter’ places. The suggestion of sacredness is complemented by Winton’s erudite and flawed mentor characters whose conversations gesture eloquently toward the numinous in these salt landscapes.' (Publication abstract)