AustLit

'Judith Wright is celebrated as a quintessentially Australian literary figure. Her poetry engages with the land, with her ‘white settler’ farming family and its problematic historical relationship to Indigenous people, and with environmental issues. Despite living almost exclusively within one nation space, Wright’s mental spaces included transnational exchanges. This chapter tracks one line of cultural influence involving an Australian religious movement with links to India, translations of Hafiz in England and the adaptation of a Persian poetic form, the ghazal, in Wright’s later work.'

Source: Abstract.

'If the transnational is often mapped at a macro scale, it also occurs at many micro levels, some of which centre on the human body. This chapter surveys a range of print and visual media to see how the movements of genetic material are represented as they occur within and across national spaces, and how transnational surrogacy contracts, third-party provision of gametes and adoption reconfigure the family. Key genres dealing with the ‘reproscape’ are outlined: documentaries, memoirs, fiction, digital media, television dramas and film. The focus is on Australia and two central examples involve Australian-Indian exchanges: a memoir of commissioning surrogacy by Barry du Bois and the memoir of adoption by Saroo Brierly, which was made internationally famous as the film Lion.'

Source: Publisher's blurb.

'J.M. Coetzee is best known for winning the Nobel Prize for literature on the basis of writing about his South African homeland. He is also famous for his literary configuring of ethics in relation to human-animal relationships. Coetzee is now an Australian citizen. This chapter provides a reading of the international travels of author, implied author, character and text, with a central interest in the relation between appropriation and negotiations of a transnational identity. Australian woman Elizabeth Costello (lecturing abroad on animal rights) reappears in the regional space of Adelaide, making Elizabeth Costello, Slow Man and subsequent books textual spaces in which Coetzee wrestles with the enigmas of migration, the gaps in history and the ‘masquerade’ that is appropriation of ‘other’ identities. The chapter arises from transnational knowledge transfers, its authors being part of the growth of Australian Studies in India and beyond.'

Source: Abstract.

'The Australian government has recently received the report of a Royal Commission into the nation’s management of aged care. This followed media scandals about physical and sexual abuse, neglect and inadequate controls during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Though all discussion occurred within a national context, this chapter shows that the aged-care ‘industry’ is a space of transnational flows, both in the export of business and models and in the internal movements of staff who are frequently unskilled immigrant labour. The chapter notes some Australian-Indian links and looks at how ‘the old folks’ home’ as heterotopic space has been represented in Australian literature.'

Source: Abstract.