AustLit

'There is every reason for wanting to get to the bottom of Rupert Murdoch. It is arguable that he has done more than any modern individual to shape public life, policy, and conversation in those parts of the Anglosphere where his media interests either dominate or hold serious sway. His influence is richly textured, transformative. Beyond bringing a populist insouciance to his host of print and television properties, he is also unafraid of using his reach as a political weapon, a tactic used with such vehement ubiquity that governments pre-emptively buckle to what they suppose is the Murdoch line. Debate is thus distorted and circumscribed. Public anxiety is co-opted as a cynically exploited tool of sales and marketing.' (Introduction)

'Spellbinding, genre-defying, and powerful in its vision of the future, Kate Mildenhall’s third novel, The Hummingbird Effect, interweaves four matrilineal narratives that span the years 1933 to 2181. Set in Footscray and its surrounds, including the Meatworks, Sanctuary Gardens Aged Care, and a futuristic Forest/Inlet/Island, the novel explores the central concern of ‘unmaking the world’ in order to ‘begin again’.' (Introduction)

'Anyone who watched the recent SBS survival series Alone Australia will have gained a new understanding of western Tasmania: of how wild it is, and how rugged, and how cold. A hand-to-mouth, hardscrabble life of subsistence farming there would be bad enough today; for the nineteenth-century white settlers of Annette Higgs’s novel it is close to unsurvivable, and indeed some of her most vulnerable characters do not survive it.' (Introduction)

'Dennis Glover’s third novel centres on the much-mythologised British Antarctic Expedition of 1910–13 that saw Captain Robert Falcon Scott attempt to reach the geographic South Pole for the first time in history. Scott and four companions arrived at the Pole too late (five weeks after Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen) and would later succumb to the brutal conditions encountered on their return journey to Cape Evans. As Glover alludes to in the preface (and dramatises throughout the novel), details of the Scott expedition – possible causes of the tragedy, potential alternatives – as well as its historical, cultural, and/or scientific significance, have long been the subject of voluminous print and broadcast media (both popular and academic) and have fuelled often obsessive and granular debates. Thaw is both a contribution to, and comment on, this discourse.' (Introduction)

'British sculptor Barbara Hepworth wrote that ‘there is no landscape without the human figure’. Similarly, there is no human without the landscape in which they are situated, human and landscape mutually shaping, resisting and defining the other.

'Three new Australian novels probe this interdependence, each of them concerned with the historical forces that have silenced and confined women, and each of them testing the capacity of their female characters to assert their stories, their selfhood, in the face of a hostile and unfamiliar landscape. Critically, what differentiates the novels is the degree to which their authors discover within these environments a similitude with their characters’ emotional struggle, the landscape not merely adorning the narrative but becoming essential to it.'(Introduction)

'These are the words of Mrs Curren, the elderly narrator of J.M. Coetzee’s under-appreciated mid-period novel Age of Iron (1990), but it would be easy enough to find similarly anguished sentiments being expressed by the Magistrate in Waiting for the Barbarians (1980), or Dostoevsky in The Master of Petersburg (1994), or David Lurie in Disgrace (1996), or the eponymous protagonist of Elizabeth Costello (2003). It has long been apparent that there is a recognisable Coetzeean type, who appears in various guises in his many novels. These characters tend to be educated products of their relatively privileged social positions. They are conscious of the pain and injustice in the world, conscious of their own suffering, and conscious of their impotence in the face of overmastering contexts. Their common instinct is to philosophise about these problems. Many ironies, gruelling and subtle, arise from their desire for redemption and their simultaneous awareness of its impossibility, not least of which is that their penchant for metaphysical high-mindedness has a distinct tendency – on display in Mrs Curren’s lament – to bend back on itself in a way that resembles self-absorption or even self-pity.' (Introduction)

'Emmett Stinson’s brief critical survey centres on Gerald Murnane’s four major ‘late fictions’, beginning with Barley Patch (Giramondo, 2009) and ending with Border Districts (Giramondo, 2017). It is a timely and illuminating companion to Murnane’s recent fiction and works well as an extension of the first monograph on his work, Imre Salusinszky’s Gerald Murnane (Oxford University Press, 1993). Although the two books have different points of focus, they are slim yet substantial studies, each dealing with a distinct period of Murnane’s literary career, and both are eminently readable.' (Introduction)

'Andrew Taylor has been an important figure in the Australian poetic landscape since his first book, The Cool Change, appeared in 1971. Identified with no particular group or aesthetic tendency, he has worked as poet and academic in Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth, and is now retired from teaching and based in Sydney.'  (Introduction)

'For a long time, Australia has had a conservative poetry culture. In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when modernist poets in Europe, Asia, America, and – somewhat belatedly – the United Kingdom revolutionised international literature, Australian poets continued writing mainly conventional verse.' (Introduction)

'As an abortion provider for more than forty years, and an advocate for abortion law reform and improved abortion services for more than fifty, I approached this book with alacrity. Around one hundred thousand abortions are performed in Australia every year, yet abortion is still not easily talked or written about. I felt that a non-fiction work of nearly three hundred pages on the topic, by a person who had experienced abortion, would be a welcome addition to existing literature, something that other people, contemplating or experiencing abortion, might absorb themselves in.' (Introduction)

'A confession: I was a child actor. Never a child star, although certainly that was the intention. For years I endured the three-hour drive from Canberra to Sydney, preparing for my five-minute meeting with some Surry Hills casting director, whose first question would inevitably be ‘How’s your American accent?’ The zenith of my career was a thirty-second commercial for the orange-flavoured soft drink Mirinda, a merchandising tie-in with the release of Spider-Man 2, shot at Fox Studios on a full-sized replica of a New York subway carriage. On the soundstage next door, Baz Luhrmann was directing Nicole Kidman in their famously extravagant campaign for Chanel No. 5. There we all were: Australians in Australia, pretending to be Americans for America. Even at that early age, I sensed that Australian cinema existed in the long shadow of Hollywood, and that there has always been, as Sam Twyford-Moore expertly describes in his new book, ‘some kind of psychic gangway between Sydney and Los Angeles’.'(Introduction)