AustLit

'Video games with suburban settings offer distinctive experiences of quotidian environments. This article examines how Australian games set in homes or verdant residential neighbourhoods contribute to a global circulation of ideas about suburban life. It contributes to understanding the relationship between Australian games and Australian society by showing how gameworlds that represent everyday spatial environments exist at intersections of the global and the local. By using suburbia as a focal point for demonstrating how Australian games can be read on both international and local levels, the article explores an alternative to a cultural nationalist approach. The Australian games examined are Rumu (Robot House, 2017), Roombo: First Blood (Samurai Punk, 2019), Mars Underground (Moloch Media, 2019), Moving Out (SMG Studio and DevM Games, 2020), Untitled Goose Game (House House, 2020) and Unpacking (Witch Beam, 2021). This article argues that by positioning suburbia as both familiar and foreign, games offer experiences of virtual travel and exploration that contribute to re-imagining everyday environments. While addressing universal themes such as moving house and domestic labour, these games can also be understood in relation to Australian cultural traditions and contexts.' (Publication abstract)

'In his 2018 memoir, No Friends but the Mountains: Writing from Manus Prison, Kurdish-Iranian journalist Behrouz Boochani bears witness to the abuses of human rights he and his fellow refugees suffered in the Manus detention centre. While Boochani’s memoir has been largely read in terms of its political criticism of the oppressive system of the prison and colonial and neo-colonial discourses that form its basis, existing readings of his work have also pointed to and celebrated its universal aspect and its broader scope beyond the Manus prison. On this basis, the book has been rightly celebrated. While agreeing with these emphases in previous studies, this article offers a new reading of Boochani’s work that accounts for the transnational and diasporic nature of Boochani’s suffering, struggle and resistance. In doing so, it shows how Boochani’s work – as his own mode of resistance against his unjust ‘offshore’ incarceration – should also be read through the lens of the transnational Kurdish struggle.' (Publication abstract)

'This article examines adaptation as an industrial strategy in the context of Australian commercial broadcast television. I analyse Kriv Stenders’s 2017 mini-series Wake in Fright—based on Kenneth Cook’s novel – for Network 10, Australia’s third commercial broadcaster. Wake in Fright imitates the features of ‘quality’ television, and I read the commission, development, and production of the property as a strategic technique to compete in a local industrial landscape that is under rapid (and global) transformation. I examine this production through the ‘adaptation industries’, a critical approach to adaptation that puts texts in their industrial context. I first historicize the mini-series as a distinct form of Australian television production, then I analyse the formal innovation and style of Wake in Fright and suggest that the mini-series failed to cultivate an audience due to the pressures of commercial television. Although this production may ultimately be (commercially) unsuccessful, this article suggests that it crystalizes anxieties about the future of local content on Australian television in an increasingly globalized marketplace. Approaching Australian television production through the ‘adaptation industries’ helps understand the importance of identifiably Australian content in the face of increasingly globalized streaming platforms and an internationalized broadcast sector.' (Publication abstract)