AustLit

Mulligan and Nadarajah place the inspiration for the inaugural Two Fires Festival in the context of Australian cultural and political trends in the early years of the twenty-first century.

Bonyhady examines the conflict experienced by Judith Wright between her commitment to activism and her vocation as a poet.

Coming from an American perspective, Laurie Kutchins enters into the 'power and beauty and moving image' of Judith 'Wright's poetry. Her plea is to keep Wright's poems 'mysterious, opalescent and vulnerable' and to allow them to 'bind us into a deeper seeing, an older ear. Let them conjure ghosts and cry a wild sound that wanes yet ever haunts.'

'There has been considerable public debate in Australia in recent years about the role of writers in addressing the particular nature of the 'time in which we live'. This debate is not a new one, but rather forms part of a larger argument that has taken place periodically in Australia since at least the 1930s regarding whether our writers do, or should, take current life in Australia - its politics and problems - as the subject matter for their novels. This paper examines this debate in relation to ways in which Australian novels can tackle public or everyday life in relation to ideas about a national literature and the mainstream. It asks what this reveals about our culture.' (Local Global abstract)

'Imagination is a deeply radical force, yet some postmodern orthodoxies dismiss it as naive modernism. I disagree. Nurturing an ecocentric ethic requires re-imagining ourselves and our world, a process in which storytelling excels. When I first began nature writing l wrote relatively straightforward natural history. Eventually, I saw that I could not write about the natural history of a place without enquiring deeply into its social and political history. Without history, there is no possibility of political engagement.

'After considerable reflection on my own writing praxis, I came to ally myself with ecofeminism and post-colonialism. Neither is unproblematic, but their understandings of the operations of power allow the possibility of pursuing genuine encounters across the intra-human divides of gender, class, race and ethnicity, as well as the species barriers set unnecessarily high by our current culture. Imagination is the shortest bridge between the local and the global. It unlocks the door to a radically different future. We should not be afraid to use it.' (Global Local abstract)