AustLit

'Thea Astley is a figure who is strongly associated with music, both in her life interests and in her writing rhythms and allusions; this article investigates the uses of music in her 1972 novel The Acolyte. Drawing on a recent genre of critical musicology that understands music to be a social practice, The Acolyte is read in relation to mid-twentieth-century cultural debates around the development of a distinctive Australian classical music. Centring on the blind pianist turned composer Jack Holberg, The Acolyte is grounded in the Gold Coast hinterland as an inspiring and generative landscape, in contrast with the desolate outback favoured in national mythologies. Holberg’s ‘Gold Coast Symphony’, arguably the turning point of the novel, imaginatively writes this coastal fringe of urban debauchery into the vernacular of classical music through its performance in conservative 1960s Brisbane. In this article, I read The Acolyte as a novel positioned within an Australian musicological history that intersects with the poetics of place, the politics of gender and sexuality, and ongoing national formations through cultural production.' (Publication abstract)

'This paper is a response to activism in the summer of 2016/17 when bulldozers pushed a 5km highway footprint, known as the Roe 8 extension, through urban wetlands and woodlands in Perth’s southern suburbs. We argue that the impact of the community campaign to halt Roe 8, and the clearing of this land evoked a form of cultural mourning and loss that can be thought of as solastalgia (Albrecht 2008).  As an increasingly common experience in the Anthropocene, we are interested in how solastalgia can be expressed. In our need to comprehend and articulate solastalgia, we propose that a poetic response to the Roe 8 bulldozing offers a complex and intense a form of mourning which is not restricted to that summer of activism but connects with broader experiences of environmental loss.  Poetry has long been a form of writing that unsettles, that gives voice to the un-namable, to the currents and sinews that run beneath the surface of an often alienating and incomprehensible society. As part of a tradition of activist poetics, this article includes poetry written in response to the physical affect of witnessing radical ecological destruction.'  (Publication abstract)

'When Inez Baranay’s seventh book, Neem Dreams, was released in September 2003, it met with wide critical acclaim in India, yet was barely noticed in Australia. Baranay had been publishing in Australia for almost 20 years, but this novel was published in India, indicating a shift in her publishing career. While Neem Dreams continues Baranay’s interest in issues of Third-World development and with Western tourism, travel and trade, I propose in this chapter that it also engages with Australian literary criticism, especially in postcolonial debates. Neem Dreams was released almost a decade after Baranay’s nonfiction text, Rascal Rain (1994), which met with fierce criticism. That decade was one in which Baranay addressed that criticism, contemporary theory and the academy. I argue, therefore, that Neem Dreams signals Baranay’s uneasy relationship with Australian writing, publishing and identity, as well as her changed attitude to the academy and contemporary theory. While the back cover blurb of Neem Dreams alerts us to the neem tree ‘acting as a kind of crucible for India’, I want to argue that, in many ways, postcolonial theory is the crucible for this book. In this chapter then, I offer a reading of Baranay’s literary career from 1994 to 2004 through its encounters with the academy, with Rascal Rain and Neem Dreams operating as bookends. Her substantial and productive career means that shifts in institutional and political discourses become evident in tracing the ways in which Baranay’s texts and career are read (and written). I am interested in the kinds of questions a career such as hers raises about the imbrication of theory and fiction and the circulation of authority among writers, critics and the academy.' (Introduction)

'When Inez Baranay’s seventh book, Neem Dreams, was released in September 2003, it met with wide critical acclaim in India, yet was barely noticed in Australia. Baranay had been publishing in Australia for almost 20 years, but this novel was published in India, indicating a shift in her publishing career. While Neem Dreams continues Baranay’s interest in issues of Third-World development and with Western tourism, travel and trade, I propose in this chapter that it also engages with Australian literary criticism, especially in postcolonial debates. Neem Dreams was released almost a decade after Baranay’s nonfiction text, Rascal Rain (1994), which met with fierce criticism. That decade was one in which Baranay addressed that criticism, contemporary theory and the academy. I argue, therefore, that Neem Dreams signals Baranay’s uneasy relationship with Australian writing, publishing and identity, as well as her changed attitude to the academy and contemporary theory. While the back cover blurb of Neem Dreams alerts us to the neem tree ‘acting as a kind of crucible for India’, I want to argue that, in many ways, postcolonial theory is the crucible for this book. In this chapter then, I offer a reading of Baranay’s literary career from 1994 to 2004 through its encounters with the academy, with Rascal Rain and Neem Dreams operating as bookends. Her substantial and productive career means that shifts in institutional and political discourses become evident in tracing the ways in which Baranay’s texts and career are read (and written). I am interested in the kinds of questions a career such as hers raises about the imbrication of theory and fiction and the circulation of authority among writers, critics and the academy.' (Introduction)