Australian Autobiographical Narratives Volume 2 and its partner Volume 1 provide researchers with detailed annotations of published Australian autobiographical writing. Both volumes are a rich resource of the European settlement of Australia. Theis selection concentrates on the post-gold rush period, providing portraits of 533 individuals, from amateur explorers to politicians, from pioneer settlers to sportsmen. Like Volume 1, it offers an intimate and absorbing insight into nineteenth-century Australia.
Comprehensive guide to published Australian autobiographical writing which deals with life in Australia up to 1850. Entries are listed alphabetically by author's name. Includes three separate indexes to personal names, places and subjects. Walsh has worked on numerous Australian reference publications. Hooton teaches English at the Australian Defence Force Academy and is co-author of 'The Oxford Companion to Australian Literature' (1985); Walsh is assisting her in preparing a new edition.
A wave of life stories and autobiographical narratives by Aboriginal women began in the late 1970s and gained momentum a decade later with the publication of Sally Morgan’s My Place (1987), which became a bestseller. While some of the books of the first wave focused mainly (if not exclusively) on the author, Aboriginal women’s life stories widened over time to include transgenerational histories of the family. Reading Aboriginal Women’s Life Stories is an important discussion of books that have shaped our understanding of contemporary Indigenous Australian literature. Anne Brewster provides an in-depth textual analysis of three key titles and situates them in relation to concepts of history, race, gender, family, storytelling and Aboriginality in modern Australia. “Looking back, we can recognise now what an extraordinary phenomenon these life stories are, and how they have changed understandings of Aboriginality and writing … The return of this classic book in a new edition is a welcome reminder that Anne Brewster’s careful, deeply respectful and informed approach to these writings is as necessary now as it ever was.” —Professor Gillian Whitlock FAHA
This book is about how Australians have responded to stories about suffering and injustice in Australia, presented in a range of public media, including literature, history, films, and television. Those who have responded are both ordinary and prominent Australians—politicians, writers, and scholars. All have sought to come to terms with Australia's history by responding empathetically to stories of its marginalized citizens.Drawing upon international scholarship on collective memory, public history, testimony, and witnessing, this book represents a cultural history of contemporary Australia. It examines the forms of witnessing that dominated Australian public culture at the turn of the millennium. Since the late 1980s, witnessing has developed in Australia in response to the increasingly audible voices of indigenous peoples, migrants, and more recently, asylum seekers. As these voices became public, they posed a challenge not only to scholars and politicians, but also, most importantly, to ordinary citizens.When former Prime Minister Kevin Rudd delivered his historic apology to Australia's indigenous peoples in February 2008, he performed an act of collective witnessing that affirmed the testimony and experiences of Aboriginal Australians. The phenomenon of witnessing became crucial, not only to the recognition and reparation of past injustices, but to efforts to create a more cosmopolitan Australia in the present. This is a vital addition to Transaction's critically acclaimed Memory and Narrative series.
This book introduces in a lively and succinct way the major writers, literary movements, styles and genres that, at the beginning of a new century, are seen as constituting the field of 'Australian literature'. The book consciously takes a perspective that sees literary works not as aesthetic objects created in isolation by unique individuals, but as cultural products influenced and constrained by the social, political and economic circumstances of their times, as well as by geographical and environmental factors. It covers indigenous texts, colonial writing and reading, poetry, fiction and theatre throughout two centuries, biography and autobiography, and literary criticism in Australia. Other features of the companion are a chronology listing significant historical and literary events, and suggestions for further reading.
This book traces the beginnings of literary (narrative) journalism in Australia. It contributes to evolving international definitions of the form, while providing a glimpse into Australia’s early press history and development as a nation. The book comprises two parts. The first examines the forerunners of literary journalism before and during the establishment of a free press, including the letters, diaries and journals of the early colonists, as well as sketches published in the first magazines and newspapers. The book asks if these were “reporting” when there was no thriving press until well into the 19th century -- many were written by women and convicts whose voices otherwise went unheard. The second part examines the first expressions of literary journalism in forms more recognisable today, covering topics as varied as homelessness in Melbourne, the Queensland trade in Pacific Islander labour, and Australia’s involvement in overseas wars, particularly the Boer War. The resulting cultural history reveals important milestones in the development of Australia’s press and literature, while demonstrating the concerns unveiled in colonial literary journalism still resonate in Australia in the 21st century.
Gender and Memory brings together contributions from around the world and from a range of disciplines--history and sociology, socio-linguistics and family therapy, literature--to create a volume that confronts all those concerned with autobiographical testimony and narrative, both spoken and written. The fundamental theme is the shaping of memory by gender. This paperback edition includes a new introduction by Selma Leydesdorff, coeditor of the Memory and Narrative series of which this volume is a part. Are the different ways in which men and women are recalled in public and private memory and the differences in men's and women's own memories of similar experiences, simply reflections of unequal lives in gendered societies, or are they more deeply rooted? The sharply differentiated life experiences of men and women in most human societies, the widespread tendencies for men to dominate in the public sphere and for women's lives to focus on family and household, suggest that these experiences may be reflected in different qualities of memory. The contributors maintain that memories are gendered, and that the gendering of memory makes a strong impact on the shaping of social spaces and expressive forms as the horizons of memory move from one generation to the next. They argue that in order to understand how memory becomes gendered, we need to travel through the realms of gendered experience and gendered language.
My Place begins with Sally Morgan tracing the experiences of her own life, growing up in suburban Perth in the fifties and sixties. Through the memories and images of her childhood and adolescence, vague hints and echoes begin to emerge, hidden knowledge is uncovered, and a fascinating story unfolds - a mystery of identity, complete with clues and suggested solutions. Sally Morgan's My Place is a deeply moving account of a search for truth, into which a whole family is gradually drawn; finally freeing the tongues of the author's mother and grandmother, allowing them to tell their own stories.
The essays in Tracing the Autobiographical work with the literatures of several nations to reveal the intersections of broad agendas (for example, national ones) with the personal, the private, and the individual. Attending to ethics, exile, tyranny, and hope, the contributors listen for echoes and murmurs as well as authoritative declarations. They also watch for the appearance of auto/biography in unexpected places, tracing patterns from materials that have been left behind. Many of the essays return to the question of text or traces of text, demonstrating that the language of autobiography, as well as the textualized identities of individual persons, can be traced in multiple media and sometimes unlikely documents, each of which requires close textual examination. These “unlikely documents” include a deportation list, an art exhibit, reality TV, Web sites and chat rooms, architectural spaces, and government memos, as well as the more familiar literary genres—a play, the long poem, or the short story. Interdisciplinary in scope and contemporary in outlook, Tracing the Autobiographical is a welcome addition to autobiography scholarship, focusing on non-traditional genres and on the importance of location and place in life writing. Read the chapter “Gender, Nation, and Self-Narration: Three Generations of Dayan Women in Palestine/Israel” by Bina Freiwald on the Concordia University Library Spectrum Research Repository website.
