AustLit

'As a largely unexplored group of organisms, fungi are ecologically complex members of the Australian biota. Fungi represent non-human alterity and interstitiality—neither animal not plant, beautiful yet evanescent, slimy and lethal, and eliding scientific categorisations. Donna Haraway's notion of "companion species" and Anna Tsing's "arts of inclusion" remind us that sensory entanglements are intrinsic to human-fungi relations. Drawing conceptually from Haraway and Tsing, this paper will examine examples of poetry from John Shaw Neilson, Jan Owen, Douglas Stewart, Geoffrey Dutton, Caroline Caddy, Michael Dransfield, Philip Hodgins, Jaime Grant and John Kinsella that represent sensory involvements with fungi based in smell, sound, taste and touch. For Stewart, the crimson fungus is archetypal of danger, ontologically ambivalent and warranting physical distance. For Caddy and Dransfield, fungi are nutriment around which social and personal events transpire, whereas for Kinsella, fungi express concisely—as part of an ecological milieu—nature's dynamic alterity.' (Author's abstract)

'Aboriginal Australian author Kim Scott's True Country first novel, reveals the author's grappling with his Aboriginal identity amidst a community that has been deracinated, impoverished of its culture, thriving on reciprocity demanding welfare system and subjected to abominating ghettoization. The obvious reason being the corrosive assimilative workings of the white Australian nation-state. Driven by the zeal to unearth the spiritual truth/identity about this community and his self, Billy—the narrator sets out for a rummaging and recovers the meaning of true Aboriginal identity both at individual and community level. At the same time, as identity is internally heterogeneous, slippery, unstable and situational, true Aboriginal identity reclaiming remains a matter of strategic and subversive cultural resistance. While resisting white deracinating practices, the author discovers a 'true country'—a true Aboriginal identity— that could be realized beyond the modern truths in the world of 'Dreamtime reality'. It is this strategized cultural resistance to the assimilative white Australian nation-state, as is evident in the invective writing style of Scott, which I will highlight in this paper.' (Author's abstract)

'The proposed paper attempts to investigate the nuanced layers of multiculturalism and ethnicity in Australia through the lens of the Chinese-Australian writer, Ouyang Yu. His novel, The Eastern Slope Chronicle, written from the perspective of a student's cooperation with the term 'postcolonial', throws a compulsive doubt on the celebration of multiculturalism. Whereas the novel deals with central 'postcolonial' questions like nationhood, political relation between countries, repatriation, violence, and immigrant identity, its unabridged and cut-and-dried presentation of the corporate packaging of terms like multicultural and postcolonial or the body of the diasporic student as the product of study and university research invites more critical thoughts on university space, the category of international student or the commodification of feelings like love, emotion and soul. In a way, it seeks the irony and economy of 'affect' in a supposedly 'postcolonial' novel.' (Author's abstract)