AustLit

'The 2023 Liquid Amber Poetry Prize invited poets to respond to the broad topic of 'home', which it turns out, can occupy a very rich yet often complex place within human experience. Poetry is, as ever, a powerful medium to reflect and communicate that complexity. In the variety and skillfulness of their poetic craft, the poets in this Long List anthology have provided readers with poignant and insightful reflections on how we might all understand the idea of home - a place that can hold us or become our undoing - as a vital human 'centre of gravity' to be acknowledged and grappled with, whether we inhabit it or not.' (Publication summary)

'Five years after first living in the Indian Ocean Territories, Reneé Pettitt-Schipp finds herself returning, haunted by memories of the asylum seekers she taught there in Australia’s detention system. Why do the islands still have a hold on her? Why are her memories such troubled ones? And why can she not let go?

'Closer to Indonesia than Australia, Christmas Island and Cocos (Keeling) Islands are out of sight and out of mind to most Australians, but they are the sites of some of our frontier wars, the places where our identity is laid bare in all its flawed complexity – and the places where there is time and space enough to ask: can we be better than this?

'A travel narrative, a memoir and a thought-provoking look at Australia’s complicated history with Christmas and Cocos (Keeling) Islands and the asylum seekers detained there.' (Publication summary)

"This deeply personal book is also an important historical record. Written from the heart and covering a period of time working on Christmas Island with asylum seekers until her return to Australia with an urgency to bear witness, Pettitt-Schipp's steady eye is levelled at a facade of Australian inclusivity and openness "this land's edge /has always been an invitation/a white-toothed smile/ to walk on". To those denied entry, those white teeth become menace, exclusion, shark, crocodile. In a book filled with heart-breakingly tender portraits, borders and bodies, sanctions and sanctuary are held close to each other in ways which articulate the space but also, the common ground between "us"."--Amanda Joy **"These beautiful Christmas Island poems capture both the despair of asylum seekers imprisoned by rock and sea and their ancient will to continue."--Gillian Triggs (Series: UWAP Poetry) [Subject: Poetry]' (Publication summary)

'The requirement for separate creative and exegetical components by universities offering creative doctoral programmes is a largely accepted model in Australia. The Research Question Model adopted by Curtin University in Western Australia is an example of this. The parallel, ‘independent’ articulation of creative and academic responses is explored in this article by a supervisor and three PhD candidates all writing in the genre of creative non-fiction. We suggest that the boundaries between the scholarly and creative in creative non-fiction works are far from clear and that this reflects both contemporary non-fiction publishing and new movements in scholarly writing. We propose that Barthes’s ‘ambiguous genre’, the essay, may be one useful way of conceptualising the non-fiction creative doctorate.'  (Publication abstract)

'In 2011 I began the job of working with ‘un-Australians’ in ‘un-Australia.’ Teaching asylum seekers on Christmas Island and the Cocos (Keeling) Islands over the next three years became a border crossing of my own. As I heard story after story of suffering and overcoming, I began to hear a larger narrative that spoke to what it meant to be human, a story in which I found myself implicated. At the same time, large tides on Cocos meant other binaries like land and sea were blurred daily by the ocean’s dynamic movements. In all that flux I lost my father to cancer, and it was at this juncture I turned to poetry. In this paper I will explore how tidalectics and critiques of insularity informed a body of poetry that became a process of counter-imagining, helping me find my way back to ‘others’ and a world I thought I knew.' (Publication abstract)