AustLit

'It is not unusual to encounter feminist re-readings of traditional stories, in the manner of speaking back via parodic challenges to gender stereotypes, but it is rare to find a writer re-dressing the skeletal bones of narrative to offer nuanced and sensual texts which subvert but also re-animate tales. And that is what is achieved in Beverley Farmer’s This Water:Five Tales (2017). After the contemplative essays of The Bone House (2005), with their stark black and white imagery and emphasis on dormancy and stone, Farmer returns to fiction where inherited stories are re-shaped to challenge the confines of precedent. This new publication includes a first-person story that illustrates the formative effects of word and image, reinterpretations of two Celtic tales, one Greek legend and a macabre European fairy-tale. Each story is discrete but they all reconsider masculist perceptions of women through the ages. This paper considers the re-framing and interrogation of the gendered designs of oral and folkloric traditions in This Water: Five Tales, focussing on ‘water’as a unifying theme and the fluency of Farmer’s poetic prose.'  (Publication abstract)

‘An ecologically-informed point of view’, says Wendy Wheeler (2006: 91), is one 'that sees all life, including culture, as naturally co-evolved and interdependent’. We can be unconscious of the fact that we are ‘embodied creatures’ for whom ‘the natural world … is the ground-state’ (Wheeler 2006: 91). Constantly distracted by the mass of human-engineered activity, we have lost, Clive Hamilton says, our imagination, and the imagery to inspire an appropriate responsiveness (2005: 191). Beverley Farmer’s innovative ecocritical writing in ‘Mouths of gold’ (2005), with its nonlinear, associative structure and hybrid nature enfolding the prose poem, reveals her exemplary practice of seeing what is. Like the prose poem, the essay without a straightforward, linear structure requires focus and time to make your way through it and to understand what it is offering. John Tomlinson has noted that time itself is neither linear-progressive nor cyclic; it has accidents and surprises in store and is constituted by profound rifts and forks (2007). These rifts in time make us aware of the contingency of our existence. Survival and successful adaptation in environments that are in crisis in the early twenty-first century will require a constant reflexive re-balancing, an experimental approach, a strategy of improvisation. ' (Author's abstract)