AustLit

'This paper presents a number of key similarities between Nam Le’s story ‘Halflead Bay’ in The Boat and Tim Winton’s 2004 collection of short stories The Turning. Indeed the scale and type of these similarities indicates more than a subconscious attempt at creating what could be considered a quintessentially regional Australian voice. There seems to be mimicry, counterfeit or the call of the lyrebird at play in this story. Picking up Ken Gelder’s ideas of citation and ventriloquism from his 2010 discussion of proximate reading, alongside Connor's discussion of ventriloquism in Dumdstruck, this paper considers the implications of Le’s attempts to ‘out-Winton’ Winton in ‘Halflead Bay.’ Of particular relevance here is Le’s own exploration of ventriloquism and accents in his Wheeler Centre presentation ‘Voices from Elsewhere’, as well the attention he pays to accents, location and problematic authenticity in The Boat’s opening story.' (Publication abstract)

'The day of the fatwa (Valentine’s 1989) has a connection with Australia. On that very day Rushdie was scheduled to attend the memorial service for his friend Bruce Chatwin (13 May 1940 – 18 January 1989). We read about this in Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton. More interestingly, though, there is more in the Rushdie archive deposited in Emory University’s Woodruff Library about his friendship with Bruce Chatwin. In the archive we discover that with Bruce Chatwin Rushdie had travelled, in 1984, to ‘the heart of Australia, which is known as the “Red Centre” to those who live there and as the “Dead Centre” to those who don’t’ (Box 4, folder 12). At the ‘Red centre’ of Australia he had climbed up Ayers Rock (for that was then the name of Uluru), was reminded of the tale of the so-called ‘dingo baby’ (Meryl Streep had made it an international cause célèbre in Evil Angels), and in a fleapit of a motel was told the story of the already drunk Douglas Crabbe, the 36-year-old long-distance truckie who, refused a drink at the Motel, drove his truck into the bar killing five people. In his defence Crabbe had said that the action was totally out of character as he loved his truck as if it were his own (children). Five years on, Rushdie, remembers this anecdote and wonders if people were willing to execute a writer because they loved their truck (their reading of blasphemy) more than human life. Looking back he thought, climbing up the acared Uluru was also blasphemy. Mercifully climbers were no longer permitted to ascend the massive rock. And then we get this note:

'It was on the flight home from that Australian journey in 1984 that he had begun to understand how to write The Satanic Verses.

In the archive there is a 2-page ms titled ‘Notes Towards an essay on Australia.’ In this paper I examine notes Rushdie made during his Australian trip to offer an outline of what the shape of the essay may have been had Rushdie written it. And , additionally, what bits of Australia make their way into The Satanic Verses.'(Publication abstract)

'In the Museo Carlo Bilotti, at the Villa Borghese in Rome, through the second half of this year (4 July–2 November 2014), there is an exhibition entitled ‘Dreamings: Aboriginal Australian Art meets de Chirico,’ curated by Ian McLean and Erica Izett from the Sordello Missana collection of recent paintings from the Western and Central Desert regions of Australia, housed alongside the Museo’s permanent collection of work by the Italian metaphysical painter Giorgio de Chirico. The exhibition brings together works representing the mysteries and intensities of space, place and location from (at least) two profoundly different aesthetic, spiritual, cultural and curatorial traditions. All the paintings in the exhibition are compelling in themselves, but as a collection or exhibition they bear a further point of interest in the ways they suggest a connection between the physical worlds in which they were produced and those where they rest and from whence they have been drawn for this exhibition. I want to draw on a number of claims made about this exhibition by curator Ian McLean.' (Introduction)

'‘I don’t belong to generation green,’ announces Jill Jones in her poem ‘Leaving It To the Sky’ (Dark Bright Doors, 2010); and in her blog Ruby Street she has voiced her discomfort with having her work seen as embodying ‘a form of comfortable ecopoetic with some fancy philosophic or metaphysical flourishes’. In ‘Leaving It To the Sky’, her narrator writes instead of an equivocal relationship to a particular city, memories of a suburban working-class childhood, and the need to avoid being allocated to any school of thinking, any ‘overarching narrative’, at all. The poem is not primarily concerned with landscape or the natural world, but opens itself to difference and contradiction, leaps of association, a refusal to be disciplined into membership of an accepted group of concerned writers.

'This paper will consider how Jill Jones tackles the ecopoetic as process rather than category. Using the work of Walter Benjamin and Timothy Morton, I argue that the ecopoetic in this sense may have little to do with a traditional sense of ‘nature’ – which has been absorbed, in Joan Retallack’s words, ‘into literary tropes and musings fed by chronically ego-bound, short-sighted human desires’. Instead, as this paper will demonstrate, Jones often reaches out to otherness, incorporating the languages of popular culture, journalism, politics, technology and the corporate: an experiment in contemporary consciousness, the human and the non-human inextricably entwined.' (Publication abstract)