AustLit

'This thesis enlarges understanding of Australian social history through a biographical study of a mixed-descent multicultural Catholic family in the north of Australia. It highlights a new dimension of the historical multiculturalism of the West Kimberley community while revealing the experiences of a hidden segment of Aboriginal society whose lives were not continuously subject to police or welfare surveillance, nor dominated by conflict and animosity. It also adds to the corpus of life story writing by Indigenous authors.'  (Introduction)

Heart Fire

The novel Heart Fire addresses steampunk’s darker side from the perspective of rebellious commoners battling a demon-haunted scientist and deadly automatons.

In the city of Forsham, all people are born with magic of varying degrees. The upper classes have been bred to have potentially destructive heart-magic, while the lower classes are supposedly left with weak and manageable skin-magic. Disaster strikes when factory owner, Sir Mathias Grindle – a mage without power – consorts with demons and attempts to elevate his position by eliminating all heart-magic.

Ju Weatherton is a commoner with too much magic who vows to overthrow the mages who suppress her. She joins forces with an outcast shapeshifter and a misfit dandy when another shapeshifter turned to stone in a human woman’s womb tricks her into facing Sir Mathias’s demons. Meanwhile Sir Mathias’s soul-stealing automatons terrorize Forsham’s skies, tearing out people’s heart-magic to transplant it into machines to provide them with perpetual motion.

The novel explores class oppression, Otherness, the use and misuse of technology in a pseudo-Victorian otherworld alongside the themes of friendship, trust, love, loss, grief and betrayal.

Steampunk : Imagined Histories and Technologies of Science and Fantasy

With reference to James P. Blaylock’s Homunculus, China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station and Ekaterina Sedia’s The Alchemy of Stone, this exegesis explores the writing of Heart Fire as a steampunk text from the perspective of a writer in the genre of fantasy. It argues that steampunk is not limited to texts representing steamdriven machinery, but also includes fantastical texts that rely on pseudo-Victorianism often set in imaginary worlds characterized by anachronism, pseudoscience, technofantasy, magic, hybridity and imagined events inspired by science fictional history as well as real history.

'This thesis sets out to analyse a subset of contemporary Australian literary fictions published between 1988-2008: a period which is referred to as a "coming of age" for Australia. During these twenty years the country moved on from the bicentennial celebrations of British settlement and into a new millennium. Such progress occurred during sober and unsettling times, when a new transnational era meant that the relationships of territory to borders, as well as the association between space and capital were being realigned. Already accorded the status of national obsession, issues of national identity, were vigorously contested. Concepts such as nation, multiculturalism and globalisation became topics for heated discussion in the public sphere. These words were appropriated by interest groups throughout this period to put forward their claims as to what constituted "real" national belonging. Therefore, from 1988 onwards to name who someone was, as well as what he/​she represented as being Australian became a mounting problem of definition. Australia‘s literary communities were not immune or isolated from the ongoing discussions in the wider public sphere. All the texts read in this thesis have already been recognised for their literary merit. Consequently, this thesis sought to read for literary value whilst also recognising the textual politics of race, class, gender and colonisation—that are inherent in the unique literary worlds created by these various contemporary Australian authors. To that end, a subset of "un-Australian fictions" was created. This subset represents the challenges and breachings which these texts, in their own unique way, bought to Australian myths of nation: traditions such as masculism; a bush ethos; the pre-eminence of white colonial settlement; connectedness to an imaginative European geography; as well as an unbreakable tie to Britain. As un-Australian fictions, these texts reflect the destabilisation of what were once certain, spatial and psychic borders and orders of Australianness. They affect as well as reflect, the wider conversation that continues today about what being Australian means in a new millennium. In discussing these un-Australian fictions, I seek to interweave two disparate discourses: the nation‘s political and social discourse i.e. the public realm and the subjective, private and fictionalized discourse in the world of the author. Both nationally and internationally, during a time of escalating fear and conservatism, Australian literature through its un-Australian fictions reclaimed and legitimated many and diverse ways of being Australian. This thesis has been written with the hope of acknowledging this fact.'

Source: Trove. (Sighted: 17/6/2013)

'Martin Harrison has been described as a writer whose poetry is a meeting place between the immensity, and intensity, of the Australian environment and the hi-tech world of everyday life. Collected here is the poet's own re-casting of his work since the early 1990s, setting accomplished poems from earlier books in the company of recent poems and prose poems. Martin Harrison's Wild Bees — New and Selected Poems marks a place of arrival and a new departure.' (Publication summary)