Australian literature

Evelyn Araluen on the pursuit of Aboriginal literary sovereignty.

When I contacted Ellen van Neerven in May to see if they would talk with me about Personal Score, I…

Joan Fleming enters The Exclusion Zone, a new collection of ‘radioactive poetry’ by Shastra Deo that mines the field of nuclear semiotics in search of a durable language of warning.

In his review of Andrew Sutherland’s debut collection of poems, John Kinsella explores the immunological imaginary at work in personal and collective responses to HIV infection.

Megan Cheong pieces together the ‘mosaic of human responses to the climate crisis’ in Else Fitzgerald’s short stories – stories which rail against generational inequality, while rallying against declinism.

In an expansive review of Paul Dalla Rosa’s debut short story collection, Ursula Robinson-Shaw rethinks our obsession with ‘craft’ and ‘tenderness’ in the context of alt-lit’s aestheticist revival.

Lost child stories have appeared so frequently in our national literature that a vast critical discourse has grown around them. As Peter Pierce suggests, these stories have long been used by white Australians to work through settler anxieties of unbelonging. Elspeth Tilley argues that ‘white vanishing’ narratives, compulsively retold, enable white Australians to assume a victim position. While the search for the lost child offers a chance for the community to rally, assert its heroic qualities, the lost white child functions as a symbol of national innocence, obscuring a history of violent dispossession.

Like False Claims, ART is a collaborative work, where each poet works in tandem in a seamless discussion that is simultaneously a sovereign conversation and a critique of nation. Papertalk Green and Kinsella showcase their poetic talents in a dynamic exchange that responds to the artistic offerings of the late Nyoongar painter Shane Pickett (1957-2010).

In Childhood, Shannon Burns quickly turns to speculation about why he, ‘a child of the welfare class’, managed, after his tumultuous early years, to find an exit route into the educated middle class, especially where many of his family members have not. I know for a fact that this is a question that plagues many people who grew up in similar circumstances to Burns, and it’s a question that I have posed and attempted to answer myself.

Praiseworthy and I got off on the wrong foot, and I blame it on the cop in my head. When I agreed to write this review, I thought I would read the book and file my piece within a few short weeks. Ha! Reading this book as an Aboriginal reader, I was never going to be let off the hook that easily. Makes sense, as cops and blackfellas don’t mix.