AustLit

'This essay draws on Dipesh Chakrabarty’s essay “The Climate of History: Four Theses” to test the capacity of memoir to bear witness to the Anthropocene. The essay focuses on three texts that feature memoirs of childhood on the wheat frontiers in Canada and Australia—Wallace Stegner’s Wolf Willow (1962), Barbara York Main’s Twice Trodden Ground (1971), and Dorothy Hewett’s Wild Card (1990). As an instrument of colonization and Indigenous dispossession, the impact of wheat was catastrophic, and these memoirs engage with the particular sites and circumstances that shape acts of remembering “wheaten childhoods.”' (Publication abstract)

An indelible part of the Brontë mythology is their symbiotic development as young artists in an isolated environment. Some time ago, Juliet Barker’s biographical scholarship on the culture at the parsonage and the Brontë siblings’ lives in Haworth has questioned that isolation in terms of the rich resources available to the Brontës siblings and a family culture that strongly encouraged their imaginative and artistic development. More recently, director Sally Wainwright’s TV movie To Walk Invisiblehas meticulously recreated the dynamic relationship between the Brontës’ childhood fantasy worlds and their adult writing, along with the strategic ways in which the three sisters built a professional path towards their lives as novelists directly through their sibling bonds. Wainwright’s interpretation of the sisters’ creative lives has gone some way in recovering both the weirdness and the ordinariness of the Brontës in it they seem closer (more graspable) than in any recreation of their lives encountered before.' (Introduction) 

'Biographies OF Dorothy Hewett (1923-2002) usually include a short section like this: In 1944 she married communist lawyer Lloyd Davies and had a son who died of leukemia at age three. The marriage ended in divorce in 1948, following Hewett's departure to Sydney to live with Les Flood, a boilermaker, with whom she had three sons over five years'. That was from Wikipedia. It's just a few sentences, a handful of facts notable for many reasons, working backwards: the quick succession of births, the shift from a middle-class; marriage into a working-class one, the death of a child. He was her first child, named Clancy after the Aboriginal activist Clancy McKenna. Clancy, the child, was born in Perth and died tragically in Melbourne in 1950. The thing that snippet from Wikipedia doesn't make clear—that few biographies explore further than the bare facts-is that when Hewett left Davies, she left Clancy too. His sickness and death came the following year.' (Introduction)
 

'I’ve been thinking about Beverley Farmer’s beautiful, aching book The Seal Woman again recently because I spent some time last year on the surf coast of Victoria, alone in a house on a hill above a beach, red-rocked and windy and wild—the same kind of landscape that Dagmar, the book’s protagonist, inhabits. Dagmar is Danish, but has returned to Australia, to the coastal town where she spent her honeymoon 20 years ago, to mourn her husband, who was killed recently in a shipping accident in the North Sea. Dagmar is housesitting for the friends they both met there, staying in the house alone, adjusting to life alone, walking on the beach and cooking simple meals and reading, and grieving, all the time grieving.' (Introduction)