Un-Australian Fictions sets out to analyse a subset of Australian literary fictions published between 1988 and 2008 – from the bicentenary of British settlement to the global financial crisis and into a new millennium. During a new transnational era, Australians faced sober and unsettling times. Already accorded the status of national obsession, issues of national identity were vigorously contested. Concepts such as the nation, multiculturalism and globalisation became topics for heated discussion in the public sphere. Australia’s literary communities were not immune or isolated from these ongoing discussions. The “un-Australian fictions” which this book studies represent the challenges which these texts, in their own unique way, bring to the Australian national ethos and the national mythology, which is predicated on traditions such as masculism; a bush ethos; the pre-eminence of white colonial settlement; connectedness to an imaginative European geography; as well as an unbreakable tie to Britain. As un-Australian fictions, these texts reflect the destabilisation of what were once certain, spatial and psychic borders and orders of Australianness. They affect as well as reflect, the wider conversation that continues today about what being Australian means in a new millennium.
From vanishing islands to talking flathead and nightmarish bushfires, Ben Walter's visionary Tasmanian fictions are unique in the landscape of Australian writing. An unemployed man chooses only to apply for jobs advertised in The Economist; a failed mountain expedition is mocked by the dead bodies of past climbers; and a father and son travel urgently to witness the miracle of Lake Pedder emptying. In What Fear Was, Walter combines beautiful, mesmerising writing with surreal discomfort and absurdist hilarity to completely upend the idea of an Australian short story. 'Lyrical and inventive, savage and strange. You've never read anyone like Ben Walter. Total mastery of language and imagery, paired with an unrivalled imagination and immense storytelling chutzpah. The shot in the arm Australian literature has been screaming for.' - Robbie Arnott 'With its unforgettable descriptions of the natural world, and the unsettling things that sometimes take place there, What Fear Was is an extraordinary collection of stories. Deeply strange, beautifully lyrical and intensely moving; no one in Australia writes like Ben Walter. The weird realism of What Fear Was is wholly unique and deeply valuable in contemporary Australian fiction.' - Ryan O'Neill. 'What Fear Was is a darkly funny, surreal and tender collection, wonderfully Tasmanian in its entanglements. You never know where Ben Walter's stories will take you - there are no straight lines here - but it's truly a pleasure to follow his trail.' - Jennifer Mills
Christos Tsiolkas is one of the most recognizable and internationally successful literary novelists working in Australia today. He is also one of the country’s most politically engaged writers. These terms – recognition, commercial success, political engagement – suggest a relationship to forms of public discourse that belies the extremely confronting nature of much of Tsiolkas’s fiction and his deliberate attempt to cultivate a literary persona oriented to notions of blasphemy, obscenity and what could broadly be called a pornographic sensibility.
Australian crime fiction has grown from the country's origins as an 18th-century English prison colony. Early stories focused on escaped convicts becoming heroic bush rangers, or how the system mistreated those who were wrongfully convicted. Later came thrillers about wealthy free settlers and lawless gold-seekers, and urban crime fiction, including Fergus Hume's 1887 international best-seller The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, set in Melbourne. The 1980s saw a surge of private-eye thrillers, popular in a society skeptical of police. Twenty-first century authors have focused on policemen--and increasingly policewomen--and finally indigenous crime narratives. The author explores in detail this rich but little known national subgenre.
Longlisted for the 2022 Indie Book Awards. Longlisted for the Australian Political Book of the Year Award. Chosen as a ‘Book of the Year’ in The Australian, The Australian Financial Review and The Australian Book Review. In a quiet Sydney street in 1937, a seven year-old immigrant boy drowned in a ditch that had filled with rain after being left unfenced by council workers. How the law should deal with the trauma of the family’s loss was one of the most complex and controversial cases to reach Australia’s High Court, where it seized the imagination of its youngest and cleverest member. These days, ‘Doc’ Evatt is remembered mainly as the hapless and divisive opposition leader during the long ascendancy of his great rival Sir Robert Menzies. Yet long before we spoke of ‘public intellectuals’, Evatt was one: a dashing advocate, an inspired jurist, an outspoken opinion maker, one of our first popular historians and the nation’s foremost champion of modern art. Through Evatt’s innovative and empathic decision in Chester v the Council of Waverley Municipality, which argued for the law to acknowledge inner suffering as it did physical injury, Gideon Haigh rediscovers the most brilliant Australian of his day, a patriot with a vision of his country charting its own path and being its own example – the same attitude he brought to being the only Australian president of the UN General Assembly, and instrumental in the foundation of Israel. A feat of remarkable historical perception, deep research and masterful storytelling, The Brilliant Boy confirms Gideon Haigh as one of our finest writers of non-fiction. It shows Australia in a rare light, as a genuinely clever country prepared to contest big ideas and face the future confidently. 'Gideon Haigh has always been an exquisite wordsmith, and he proves here that he is also an intuitive historian and acute biographer with a masterful control of the broad sweep and telling detail’ AFR Books of the Year 'Here is a master craftsman delivering one of his most finely honed works. Meticulous in its research, humane in its storytelling, The Brilliant Boy is Gideon Haigh at his lush, luminous best. Haigh shines a light on person, place and era with the sheer force of his intellect and the generosity of his words. The Brilliant Boy is simply a brilliant book.' Clare Wright, Stella-Prize winning author of The Forgotten Rebels of Eureka ‘Gideon Haigh has a nose for Australian stories that light up the past from new angles, and he tells this one with verve, grace and lightly worn erudition. I couldn’t put it down.’ Judith Brett, The Saturday Paper ‘An absolutely remarkable, moving and elegant re-reading of the early life of an extraordinary Australian. Gideon Haigh is one of Australia's finest writers and thinkers … mesmerizing … one of the best Australian biographies I have read for a long time.' Michael McKernan, Canberra Times
Colonial domestic literature has been largely overlooked and is due for a reassessment. This essay collection explores attitudes to colonialism, imperialism and race, as well as important developments in girlhood and the concept of the New Woman.
This is the first sustained study of the formal particularities of works by Bruce Pascoe, Kim Scott, Tara June Winch, and Alexis Wright. Drawing on a rich theoretical framework that includes approaches to relationality by Aboriginal thinkers, Edouard Glissant, and Jean-Luc Nancy, and recent work in New Formalism and narrative theory, the book illustrates how they use a broad range of narrative techniques to mediate, negotiate, and temporarily create networks of relations that interlink all elements of the universe. Through this focus on relationality, Aboriginal writing gains both local and global significance. Locally, these narratives assert Indigenous sovereignty by staging an unbroken interrelatedness of people and their land. Globally, they intervene into current discourses about humanity’s relationship with the natural environment, urging readers to acknowledge our interrelatedness with and dependence on the land that sustains us.
The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel provides a clear, lively, and accessible account of the novel in Australia. The chapters of this book survey significant issues and developments in the Australian novel, offer historical and conceptual frameworks, and provide vivid and original examples of what reading an Australian novel looks like in practice. The book begins with novels by literary visitors to Australia and concludes with those by refugees. In between, the reader encounters the Australian novel in its splendid contradictoriness, from nineteenth-century settler fiction by women writers through to literary images of the Anthropocene, from sexuality in the novels of Patrick White to Waanyi writer Alexis Wright's call for a sovereign First Nations literature. This book is an invitation to students, instructors, and researchers alike to expand and broaden their knowledge of the complex histories and vital present of the Australian novel.
This book is an analysis of the textual representation of dance in the Australian novel since the late 1890s. It examines how the act of dance is variously portrayed, how the word 'dance' is used metaphorically to convey actual or imagined movement, and how dance is written in a novelistic form. The author employs a wide range of theoretical approaches including postcolonial studies, theories concerned with class, gender, metaphor and dance and, in particular, Jung's concept of the shadow and theories concerned with vision. Through these variegated approaches, the study critiques the common view that dance is an expression of joie de vivre, liberation, transcendence, order and beauty. This text also probes issues concerned with the enactment of dance in Australia and abroad, and contributes to an understanding of how dance is 'translated' into literature. It makes an important contribution because the study of dance in Australian literature has been minimal, and this despite the reality that dance is prolific in Australian novels.
