AustLit

'Patrick White’s support for green issues, especially in his later life, is well documented; however, relatively little attention has been paid to date to the planetary perspective of his fiction which, as Andrew McCann suggests, hints at “the possibility of a renewed relationship to the ‘earth’ ”. Focusing on what is generally considered to be his “greenest” novel, The Tree of Man, and adopting a broadly eco-materialist approach, this article assesses White’s work in the wake of the recent ecological and planetary turns. What difference does it make to position White, not as a national or an international writer, but as a planetary writer?And what if White’s work, usually looked at for the insights it provides into human subjects and subjectivities, were to be looked at instead in relation to what Jane Bennett calls “the material agency or effectivity of nonhuman or not-quite-human things”?' (Publication abstract)

'The basis for Robert Clarke’s wide-ranging study of recent Australian travel writing is his contention that encounters with Australia – whether on the part of residents of or visitors to that country – are nearly always set against an experience of Black Australia that places Aboriginality at the centre of national life. “Aboriginality” and “Black Australia” are both tricky terms, as Clarke well knows, and both remain at the heart of intense, sometime fractious discussions about the protocols surrounding the acknowledgment of Aboriginal worldviews and ways of life. Simply put, neither Aboriginality nor Black Australia have a great deal to do with what Aboriginal people think about themselves; rather, both are intersubjective – if rarely fully reciprocal – formations that provide a general framework for what white people think about Aborigines and, far less often, what Aborigines think about them.' (Introduction)

'The essay engages with ongoing debates about the validity of comparing Holocaust memory, situating these in the context of Australia's History Wars. Looking at Markus Zusak's The Book Thief (2005) as a recent fictional attempt to confront the effects of both Holocaust memory and German perpetrator trauma, it also considers the novel's status as a displaced (Australian-authored) German survivor's account. Arguing against a facile assimilation of the novel to the contemporary 'Holocaust industry', the essay asserts the value of a transnational approach that insists on the cultural and historical specificity of the Holocaust while showing its continuing usefulness in energising discourses of traumatic memory not necessarily related to the Shoah itself. At the same time, it sounds a cautionary note against using the Holocaust, either as a form of screen memory to avoid confronting colonial violence or as a negative analogy to assert the relative innocuousness of the Australian past.' (Author's abstract)

'In an essay now just over twenty years old, Peter Pierce laments what he calls the 'dichotomising habit' of Australian literary historians. Pierce testily suggests that '[t]he literary histories of Australia that invent different issues of debate, that abandon residual insecurities concerning the value of local materials remain to be written' - a challenge since energetically met by a number of histories and companions that seem to me at least to be neither melodramatic nor dichotomous, and that bring academic discussions surrounding the national literature more or less fully up to date. However, Pierce's observation still arguably holds for public discussions, many of them involving academics, and in which the present and future of Australian literature are confidently presented from a series of often directly opposing points of view. One view, the industry equivalent to the 'gloom thesis', proposes that Australian literature is dying, and cites evidence in dwindling recruitment and enrolment numbers at Australian universities, and in the depressing number of Australian literary classics that are currently out of print. The other view, equally forthright, is that Australian literature is booming, not least because of structural changes brought about to the publishing industry by globalisation, and as evidenced in the flourishing of Australian literature in international markets, in the expansion of writers' prizes and festivals, and in the active contribution of Australian writers, both 'high-art' and popular, to ongoing discussions of Australian national culture in an increasingly mediatised public sphere.'