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Story/telling is an eclectic and fascinating collection of stories and stories about stories. With passion and verve, some of Australia's finest writers range through vast territory exploring new directions in film and media, enigmas and creativity, histories of mothering, narratives of indigenous and migrant experience, folk, country and multicultural music traditions, and dilemmas of interpretation.These writers appreciate the power of stories, for good and ill. They interrogate narratives of Australia's past and present and call for new stories for changing times. We hear voices, raised one moment, subdued the next, as if we were sitting in the Forum tent at the Woodford Festival, knowing that here and just beyond, in paint, dance, music and words, stories are happening in delicious abundance.
During the twentieth century, the southwestern corner of Australia was cleared for intensive agriculture. In the space of several decades, an arc from Esperance to Geraldton, an area of land larger than England, was cleared of native flora for the farming of grain and livestock. Today, satellite maps show a sharp line ringing Perth. Inside that line, tan-coloured land is the most visible sign from space of human impact on the planet. Where once there was a vast mosaic of scrub and forest, there is now the Western Australian wheatbelt. Tony Hughes-d'Aeth examines the creation of the wheatbelt through its creative writing. Some of Australia's most well-known and significant writers - Albert Facey, Peter Cowan, Dorothy Hewett, Jack Davis, Elizabeth Jolley, and John Kinsella - wrote about their experience of the wheatbelt. Each gives insight into the human and environmental effects of this massive-scale agriculture.
This volume explores the subterfuges, strategies, and choices that Australian women writers have navigated in order to challenge patriarchal stereotypes and assert themselves as writers of substance. Contextualized within the pioneering efforts of white, Aboriginal, and immigrant Australian women in initiating an alternative literary tradition, the text captures a wide range of multiracial Australian women authors’ insightful reflections on crucial issues such as war and silent mourning, emergence of a Australian national heroine, racial purity and Aboriginal motherhood, communism and activism, feminist rivalry, sexual transgressions, autobiography and art of letter writing, city space and female subjectivity, lesbianism, gender implications of spatial categories, placement and displacement, dwelling and travel, location and dislocation and female body politics. Claiming Space for Australian Women’s Writing tracks Australian women authors’ varied journeys across cultural, political and racial borders in the canter of contemporary political discourse.
This book offers a fresh perspective in the debate on settler perceptions of Indigenous Australians. It draws together a suite of little known colonial women (apart from Eliza Fraser) and investigates their writings for what they reveal about their attitudes to, views on and beliefs about Aboriginal people, as presented in their published works. The way that reader expectations and publishers’ requirements slanted their representations forms part of this analysis. All six women write of their first-hand experiences on Australian frontiers of settlement. The division into ‘adventurers’ (Eliza Fraser, Eliza Davies and Emily Cowl) and longer-term ‘settlers’ (Katherine Kirkland, Mary McConnel and Rose Scott Cowen) allows interrogation into the differing representations between those with a transitory knowledge of Indigenous people and those who had a close and more permanent relationship with Indigenous women, even encompassing individual friendship. More pertinently, the book strives to reveal the aspects, largely overlooked in colonial narratives, of Indigenous agency, authority and individuality.
The Handbook of World Englishes is a collection of newly commissioned articles focusing on selected critical dimensions and case studies of the theoretical, ideological, applied and pedagogical issues related to English as it is spoken around the world. Represents the cross-cultural and international contextualization of the English language Articulates the visions of scholars from major varieties of world Englishes – African, Asian, European, and North and South American Discusses topics including the sociolinguistic contexts of varieties of English in the inner, outer, and expanding circles of its users; the ranges of functional domains in which these varieties are used; the place of English in language policies and language planning; and debates about English as a cause of language death, murder and suicide.
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In this controversial and engrossing study, Richard Nile debunks some of the powerful myths of cultural nationalism and observes its passing in favour of the celebrity author. He explores the power of nationalism as a governing force in the creation and ultimate demise of Australian literature, In a clear and accessible way, Nile invokes the stylistic possibilities of narrative history and creative non-fiction, playfully blurring the lines between them. The Making of the Australian Literary Imaginationmoves from literary London to the delights of Australian bookshops, gets inside Angus and Robertson and interrogates the politics of reputation. It investigates censorship and patronage, paperback heroes and the able-bodied writer, and explores cinema and literature in the century that quite clearly belonged to the novelist.