AustLit

'In this brief paper I want to argue for the inclusion of classic works of Australian literature in a national curriculum. But I also want to suggest that canonical works are more complex objects than has sometimes been assumed in recent public debates. The canonical Australian works I know are ‘Australian’ enough, but they are also ambivalent and even conflicted about the nation and nationalism. And finally, I’ll say something about the different kinds of course design that characterise the teaching of Australian literature in schools and universities. This will lead me to argue for some degree of prescription in the curriculum (p.97).

This essay argues that understanding the locatedness of poetry is crucial as a measure by which to sift the high rhetorics of national, cosmopolitan, globalising discourses. In an analysis of the poetry of Indigenous writers Tony Birch, Sam Wagan Watson and Lionel Fogarty, and of the Federal Government's Apology to the Stolen Generations, we can see more clearly the role of literature, and particularly poetry, in debates between the local and the global.

'This essay will examine the fiction of D. H. Lawrence, Elliot Perlman, and Christos Tsiolkas with regard to their representation of Australian society, particularly in comparison to the European past and present. Its guiding dynamic will be the opposition between the egalitarian 'mateship' that D. H. lawrence found, and was discomfited by, in 1922 and the economic neoliberalism and concomitant sense of 'distinction' (to use Pierre Bourdieu's term) that Perlman and Tsiolkas see in today's Australia and to the world in which Australia manifests itself.'

'In this essay I aim to acknowledge the efficacy of the liberal humanist discourse in Remembering Babylon, whilst interrogating some of its more problematic aspects. In particular, I want to examine the implications of the notion of "shared suffering" by discussing Malouf's representation of non-indigenous trauma' (70).