AustLit

'Early childhood memories are like pieces of a giant jigsaw puzzle,' says Roberta Sykes (1997) in her autobiography, Snake Dreaming (1997, 4). She spends her life in assembling and organising these pieces in order to understand the complete picture. But, these pictures, accessed with difficulty, slip in and out of alignment quite often, thus distorting and complicating the already incomplete picture. These pieces consist of incidents that occur, people she met and people she did not meet, but whom she continues to speculate on as they were conspicuous by their absence; place that she was familiar with; and beyond that the secrets that she also had to hide securely. Like Old Nick who haunts her mother's dreams, her childhood haunts Roberta Sykes, not only dreams but through every waking moment of her life.' (Author's introduction p. 35)

Bill Ashcroft explores the 'somewhat outrageous idea of Australia as an alternative modernity'. He states: 'This appears absurd on the face of it because Australia is a westernised, developed nation. It appears even more absurd as we emerge out of eleven years of slavish adherence to American unilateralism. Therefore, I realise that I am walking on very thin ice here. However, the habit has been to think of alternative modernities as alternative to the West...' (p. 81)

Julia Gross introduces some Australian literary blogs and provides reviews and evaluations of what she considers to be the most influential of these.

'This article attempts to locate Patrick White's Voss within postcolonial and postmodern discourse, focussing on themes of identity, space, history and belonging. Written in 1957, the test is a fusion of fact and fiction and in its intermingling of genres accommodates varying ideas as well as responses. Underlying the narrative is a determined attempt by White to comprehend past narratives of the Australian continent and its inhabitants so as to grasp some understandings about them and possibly reconstitute a new world.' (p. 125)

'The focus of this study will be the manner in which identity is negotiated in Yasmine Gooneratne's first novel A Change of Skies. A 'migrant' or 'expatriate' writer writing from the periphery, Gooneratne tries to create her own postcolonial identity through her fiction...' (p.141)

In this paper Glen Phillips shows 'how 221 years ago the British and European desire to create a new nation in Australia was partly motivated by a wish to escape the pollution and overcrowding of their nations' cities.' (p152)

Jane Fernandez traces 'the tension between home and its Other, the resolution of the somewhere in-between/negation and diaspora/home' in Richard Flanagan's The Sound of One Hand Clapping. (p. 177)