Joy Wallace
Joy Wallace teaches and researches in the Faculty of Arts and Education at Charles Sturt University, Bathurst. She was Associate Dean Learning and Teaching for seven years and a member of an OLT-funded project on designing first year Humanities and Social Sciences curricula in the context of discipline threshold standards. Joy’s longstanding interest in Hazel Smith’s work, dating from their time as colleagues at the University of New South Wales, has produced several articles. Her other current research, with John O’Carroll, is on the ‘engaged’ writing of Australian women writers of the 1940s and 1950s, particularly Judith Wright and Eleanor Dark.
All essays by Joy Wallace
Discomfort Enacted In Writing: Word Migrants by Hazel Smith
What we are meant to think about are words, about the capacity of language to do other than what it seems to be doing. As someone with a professional interest herself in what tricks language can get up to (‘the sonic out-wraps the saying, the canon is in it for kicks’, the voice of ‘Subvoices’ tells us), Smith has much to say (2016, p. 90). She lets us off lightly of course, as we are disarmed by her sharp wit, but however playful the poetic surface is, the worries about language are real and are communicated.