AustLit

'A biographer’s life, Gilbert and Sullivan might have suggested, is not an easy one. D Jean Clandinin proposes that people shape their lives by stories about themselves and others, yet Paul Murray Kendall, in his The Art of Biography, also cautions that researching and writing those lived stories is like trying to make sense of an incomplete play. This paper explores some of the issues biographers face while researching and writing life stories, using as an example the writer’s current work on the life of Australian author Louis Becke, who was renowned for shaping his own life by stories, altering chronologies and events to add drama to a life story that became difficult to distinguish from his fiction. This paper also explores the nature of the personal relationship that develops between author and subject, for in writing their story, we are writing our story.'  (Publication abstract)

'The storm has become a universal trope in the literature of crisis, revelation and transformation. It can function as a trope of place, of apocalypse and epiphany, of cultural mythos and story, and of people and spirituality.

'This book explores the connections between people, place and environment through the image of cyclones within fiction and poetry from the Australian state of Queensland, the northern coast of which is characterized by these devastating storms. Analyzing a range of works including Alexis Wright's Carpentaria, Patrick White's The Eye of the Storm, and Vance Palmer's Cyclone it explains the cyclone in the Queensland literary imagination as an example of a cultural response to weather in a unique regional place. It also situates the cyclones that appear in Queensland literature within the broader global context of literary cyclones.' (Publication summary)

'Thea Astley once commented that, ‘everybody is living on a cyclonic edge’, and that many of her characters were ‘always touching on the edges of cyclones’. In Queensland literature, cyclones often appear as tropes of apocalypse: new worlds of person and place are revealed out of the destruction of the old. In Astley's novel A Boat Load of Home Folk (1968), the tempestuous forces of personal cyclones, as well as those of the cyclone destroying the island around them, overtake a group of stranded cruise passengers, and consequently place and person assume unique meanings as the characters try to survive. Although one of her least-known works, A Boat Load of Home Folk is a profound novel of human experience in which Astley uses the elemental cyclone as a trope of apocalypse that is both an instrument of destruction and a catalyst of revelation.'

Source: Abstract.

'Prior to writing his 1947 novel, Cyclone, Queensland author Vance Palmer drafted out many of his ideas for the story in three earlier short stories: ‘Cyclone’(1932), ‘Big Wind,’ and ‘Tempest,’ both published in 1936. In these stories and the later novel, Palmer develops the cyclone as trope of apocalypse, an unveiling and realization of the new inherent within the destruction of the old. As a result of experiencing both the terror and the mystery of the apocalyptic cyclonic event, Palmer’s characters realize they have transcended fears and inadequacies within themselves, enabling them to re-create new lives and new worlds.

'In order to better understand and respond to the tropics as part of the global environment, we need to accept the unique features of the regional weather, such as cyclones, and be prepared to embrace their larger meaning for life in the tropics. In a physical landscape impacted by some 207 tropical cyclones since 1858, Queensland writers have attempted to incorporate both the terror and the sublime of the cyclone into their sense of place as they have attempted to find context for the unpredictable, chaotic and destructive tropical cyclone within their ostensibly tamed and ordered natural landscape. Consequently, the cyclone has become a defining symbolic metaphor of not only physical but also of literary tropical Queensland.

'Some Queensland writers have perceived within cyclones the Burkean sublime or personal revelation, while others have seen it as motivation for community strength, cooperation and compassion. For some, the purpose of the cyclone is divine retribution, but to others it’s an apocalyptic event revealing a rare second chance for revelation and renewal. This paper will examine a range of such perceptions within Queensland literature as part of the search for meaning within cyclonic chaotic events.' (Publication abstract)