Australian literature

What makes a book distinct from a meme if both are dependent on a web of intertextual references, some of which are digital and some which rely on the printed page?

I didn’t necessarily like school but I understood what it wanted from me. My year level had 330 students, yet I managed to graduate as dux and received an equity scholarship at the University of Queensland which quite literally changed the material conditions of my life. I didn’t like telling people at university where I went to school or that I came from a single parent family that lived on welfare. I didn’t understand how some students talked so easily with lecturers. Class preparation was googling how to pronounce things like ‘Michel Foucault’. But this was water to tread, for the moral was that you never complained. It would be ungrateful.

Rather than read representations of land in terms of the politics they support or contest, what happens when we read poems of politics through the entity of the land? I am suggesting that this is (continues to be) the primary way to read Australian poetry as Australian poetry, politically. (Readings of poetry through lenses of class or other struggle are not primary in terms of their national character, only as they, too, relate to land.) My test case is Marty Hiatt’s long poem ‘the manifold’.

The cover of The Rabbits, showing a Hills Hoist and overgrown lawn, indicates something hiding in this suburban household, even as an outsized sun bears down, reminding us of the deep shadows it can cast.

The direction of indirection, or the discipline of indiscipline (to quote Frank Moorhouse) gives her writing a flow that is beguiling as well as relaxing. It suspends questions of interpretation and replaces them instead with interactions: the meaning of a work of art, whether from the Renaissance or from last week, is not to be written down like the answer to a question posed in an examination; it is found in our relationship to it, what we do or don’t do with or around it.

In Jennifer Mills’ The Airways, we travel through a series of bodies. The we here is us, the readers, but we share this journey with something else too – a ghost, a consciousness, something that speaks and thinks and feels but isn’t necessarily a body. It is something that will call into question the way we think about bodies.

One of the pleasures of Mother & I is joining Ware in the gradual discovery of his mother’s multitudinous character.

The precocious teenage girl looms large in pop music, a culture that has always been enamoured by stories of youthful ingenuity.

Small Joys of Real Life is a quintessentially Melbourne book, with Richards’ characters not straying far from the city and the inner-north postcodes: from share houses to public swimming pools, pubs to bars.

Jennifer Down’s second novel, Bodies of Light, is about Maggie, a child who is not told the truth, and so spends her life attempting to attach herself to things and people that seem true.