AustLit

'Modern histories of a nation's literature require a comprehensive, scholarly approach. A serious literary history of Australia should focus primarily on literary form and content - the stories and myths of Australians in a variety of literary genres. Relevant historical contexts will extend from local and regional concerns to Australians' links with Europe, North America and, increasingly, Asia. Colonial and post-colonial contexts provide important avenues of investigation and research, employing the scholarly disciplines of bibliography, biography and textual editing.' (Author's abstract)

Noting that 'Thirty years after its introduction, the meaning, impact and politics of multiculturalism are still contested issues in Australia', the author aims 'to examine some of the concepts, metaphors and rhetorical strategies commonly deployed in contemporary political discourse in order to tease out the complexity, or, to put it more bluntly, conceptual muddle, informing the construction of multiculturalism in Australian public debate' (Australian Cultural History Vol:28 No:2/3, 2010, p.131).

'This article contributes to discussions about the significance of fences in the Australian social imaginary. It undertakes a historical and intertextual reading of eight short stories that take the fence as their titular symbol, and explores how the fence story is rewritten at various moments of change in twentieth-century Australia. Developments in narrative form and representation are related to changes in the cultural and political contexts, through a critical engagement with Iser's argument that the institution of literature works through a 'constant crossing of the boundary between the real and the imaginary'. As an Australian icon, the fence image illustrates the continuing power of settler discourse; however, the literary reworkings of the fence story disclose new visions of identity and otherness.' (Author's abstract)

'The popular middlebrow magazine Walkabout was published between 1934 and 1974. Its principle aim was to promote travel to and within Australia and to educate Australians about their continent. It aspired to be an Australian geographic magazine, and to this end it focussed on inland and remote Australia, and natural history. For this reason, and because it was published throughout a period, particularly in the early decades, when only those Aborigines living afar from populated regions were recognised as Aborigines, many of Walkabout's articles were about Aborigines or, more commonly, made mention of them. There are very few critiques of Walkabout, but those that do exist are critical of its portrayal of Aborigines. Notwithstanding that there are many reasons to find fault, it is possible to read this material in a more salutary light, even against the apparent intention of at least one of the contributors, Ernestine Hill. This article considers the work of a number of popular writers and two of the anthropologists who contributed to Walkabout, and finds reason to be less critical and more cautious in our assessment of their narrative representation of Aborigines than is generally allowed. The period of analysis is from 1934 to 1950.' (Editor's abstract)

Delys Bird discusses issues of essentialism and authenticity as applied to Aboriginal writing. She looks at examples of non-Aboriginal editing or framing of Aboriginal texts before moving to an extended reading of Benang and how the novel negotiates between - and complicates - ideas of orality and writing and Indigenous and non-Indigenous representation and identity.