Journal articles: 'Australians, fiction'

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Bahfen, Nasya. "1950s vibe, 21st century audience: Australia’s dearth of on-screen diversity." Pacific Journalism Review : Te Koakoa 25, no. 1&2 (July 31, 2019): 29–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.24135/pjr.v25i1and2.479.

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The difference between how multicultural Australia is ‘in real life’ and ‘in broadcasting’ can be seen through data from the Census, and from Screen Australia’s most recent research into on screen diversity. In 2016, these sources of data coincided with the Census, which takes place every five years. Conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, this presents a ‘snapshot’ of Australian life. From the newest Census figures in 2016, it appears that nearly half of the population in Australia (49 percent) had either been born overseas (identifying as first generation Australian) or had one or both parents born overseas (identifying as second generation Australian). Nearly a third, or 32 percent, of Australians identified as having come from non-Anglo Celtic backgrounds, and 2.8 percent of Australians identify as Indigenous (Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander). Nearly a fifth, or 18 percent, of Australians identify as having a disability. Screen Australia is the government agency that oversees film and TV funding and research. Conducted in 2016, Screen Australia’s study looked at 199 television dramas (fiction, excluding animation) that aired between 2011 and 2015. The comparison between these two sources of data reveals that with one exception, there is a marked disparity between diversity as depicted in the lived experiences of Australians and recorded by the Census, and diversity as depicted on screen and recorded by the Screen Australia survey.

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Smith, Michelle J. "Imagining Colonial Environments: Fire in Australian Children's Literature, 1841–1910." International Research in Children's Literature 13, no. 1 (July 2020): 1–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/ircl.2020.0324.

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This article examines children's novels and short stories published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that feature bushfires and the ceremonial fires associated with Indigenous Australians. It suggests that British children's novels emphasise the horror of bushfires and the human struggle involved in conquering them. In contrast, Australian-authored children's fictions represent less anthropocentric understandings of the environment. New attitudes toward the environment are made manifest in Australian women's fiction including J. M. Whitfield's ‘The Spirit of the Bushfire’ (1898), Ethel Pedley's Dot and the Kangaroo (1899), Olga D. A. Ernst's ‘The Fire Elves’ (1904), and Amy Eleanor Mack's ‘The Gallant Gum Trees’ (1910). Finally, the article proposes that adult male conquest and control of the environment evident in British fiction is transferred to a child protagonist in Mary Grant Bruce's A Little Bush Maid (1910), dispensing with the long-standing association between the Australian bush and threats to children.

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Nelson, Claudia. "Ethel Turner and the ‘Voices of Dissent’: Masculinities and Fatherhood in The Cub and Captain Cub." Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature 13, no. 1 (January 1, 2003): 4–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.21153/pecl2003vol13no1art1292.

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In his interesting study 'Making the Australian Male: Middle-Class Masculinity 1870-1920', Martin Crotty argues that turn-of-the-century Australians firmly rejected the androgynous, domesticated gender role that both children's fiction and the public schools had offered Australian boys in the 1870s... Work such as Crotty's should help to inspire any number of reexaminations of the masculine gender role in texts that sought to acculturate young readers before, during, and after the Great War.

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Peters, Pam. "The Survival of the Subjunctive." English World-Wide 19, no. 1 (January 1, 1998): 87–103. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/eww.19.1.06pet.

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The status of the subjunctive is examined in this Australian study of its manifestations in subordinate clauses: in mandative constructions as well as those expressing purpose, condition, concession and the counterfactual. Data from the Australian ACE corpus (1986) is compared with (a) those from the American Brown corpus and the British LOB corpus (both 1961); and with (b) findings from an Australian elicitation survey of 1993. Both the diachronic corpus comparisons and the sociolinguistic profiles associated with the survey indicate declining use of the subjunctive in adverbial clauses, most notably the counterfactual type, but also those expressing purpose, concession and ordinary conditions. However the use of mandative subjunctives is stable, written into a range of corpus materials (fiction and non-fiction), and endorsed by Australians across the age range. The resilience of the mandative subjunctive in Australian (and American) usage contrasts with the prevailing view of British usage commentators, that the subjunctive, if not obsolescent, should not be preserved.

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Collingwood-Whittick, Sheila. "Settler Colonial Biopolitics and Indigenous Resistance: The Refusal of Australia's First Peoples “to fade away or assimilate or just die”." American Indian Culture and Research Journal 42, no. 2 (January 1, 2018): 11–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.17953/aicrj.42.2.collingwood-whittick.

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During the first century of Australia's colonization, settler thanatopolitics meant both casual killing of individual Natives and organized massacres of Aboriginal clans. From the mid-nineteenth century, however, Aboriginal Protection Boards sought to disappear their charges by more covert means. Thus, biopolitics of biological absorption, cultural assimilation, and child removal, designed to bring about the destruction of Aboriginal peoples, came to be represented as being in the victims' best interests. Even today, coercive assimilation is framed in the now-threadbare terms of welfare discourse. Yet, Australia's Indigenous peoples have survived the genocidal practices of the frontier era and continue to resist the relentless succession of normative policies deployed to eradicate their “recalcitrant” lifeways. This essay presents a brief historical overview of settler Australia's biopolitics and analyzes the sociocultural factors enabling Aboriginal Australians both to survive the devastating impact of settler biopower and to resist the siren call of assimilationist rhetoric. Drawing on Kim Scott's Benang and Alexis Wright's Plains of Promise, I discuss how that resistance is reflected in contemporary Indigenous life-writing and fiction.

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Kameniar, Barbara, Sally Windsor, and Sue Sifa. "Teaching Beginning Teachers to ‘Think What We Are Doing’ in Indigenous Education." Australian Journal of Indigenous Education 43, no. 2 (November 10, 2014): 113–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/jie.2014.27.

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Working with beginning teachers to assist them to begin to ‘think what we do’ (Arendt, 1998) in both mainstream and Indigenous education is problematic. This is particularly so because the majority of our teacher candidates, and indeed most of their university lecturers, are positioned close to the racial, social and cultural centre of Australian education. That is, teachers and teacher educators tend to be white, middle class, educationally successful, and accepting of the main premises and assumptions, purposes and values of formal schooling in Australia. This proximity to the centre can lead to an inability to question ideas and practices that, while everyday and seemingly innocuous, are frequently dangerous and destructive for those at the margins. In this article, we illustrate the normative power of hegemonic ideas by using aspects of the teen fiction The Hunger Games as an analogy for ‘thoughtless’ and unquestioning acceptance of authority. We then describe and discuss a pedagogic practice used within the Master of Teaching program at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education. The practice is designed to challenge normative understandings about Australian history, teaching Indigenous Australian students, and to encourage engagement with the German-American Jewish philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt's provocative question ‘What are we doing?’ (Arendt, 1998, p. 5). We conclude the article with a challenge to re-think current policies and practices in the education of Indigenous Australians.

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Chan, Henry. "The Identity of the Chinese in Australian History." Queensland Review 6, no. 2 (November 1999): 1–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1321816600001100.

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Theorising about identity has become fashionable. During 1999 alone several conferences and seminars were dedicated to identities in Australia: “Alter/Asians: Exploring Asian/Australian Identities, Cultures and Politics in an Age of Crisis” held in Sydney in February, the one-day conference “Cultural Passports” on the concept and representations of “home” held at the University of Sydney in June, and “Asian-Australian Identities: The Asian Diaspora in Australia” at the Australian National University in September. To me as a Chinese who had his childhood and education in New Zealand this concern with identity is not exceptional: I remain a keen reader of New Zealand fiction and poetry in which Pakeha New Zealanders have agonised and problematised their search for identity as an island people living among an aggressive indigenous population and in an insecure dependent economy. New Zealand identity has always been problematised as has Chinese identity: what does it mean to be Chinese? Now Asian identity has become the current issue: “We're not Asians” was the title of the paper by Lily Kong on identity among Singaporean students in Australia. White Australians appear much more content and complacent with their identity and do not indulge as much in navel gazing. And yet it may be that it is the “Australian identity” that needs to be challenged and contested so that it becomes less an exclusively WASP-ish male mateship and more inclusive of women, Aborigines and Asians.

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Ling, Rebecca. "Australians and the Pacific Rim: The contested past in the popular fiction of Di Morrissey." Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 2, no. 2 (June 1, 2013): 211–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ajpc.2.2.211_1.

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Pearce, Sharyn. "The evolution of the Queensland kid: Changing literary representations of Queensland children in children's and adolescent fiction." Queensland Review 3, no. 2 (July 1996): 59–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1321816600006449.

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Since the education explosion in mid-nineteenth century England, when astute publishers began to capitalise upon a newly created and burgeoning market, Australia has always featured prominently in fiction aimed at children and adolescents. Those British children who initially made up the bulk of the reading audience for books set in Australia were eager to read episodic stories set in exciting countries far from home, and an Australian setting offered a glamorous backdrop for tales of high adventure. Moreover, it appears that while the nineteenth-century British reading public perceived Australia as an exotic place, then Queensland was quintessentially so. A disproportionate number of early tales about life in Australia is set in this colony, most often in the outback regions, but also in the vicinity of the coastal tropics. Nineteenth-century Queensland was viewed by the British, as well as by many Australians, as a remote outpost of Great Britain; it was commonly thought of as the least urbanised, the least “civilised”, the least industrialised and perhaps the most remote of all the regions of Australia. It was widely seen as an area of great and diverse (if also mysterious and desolate) natural beauty, of rural innocence as yet unpolluted by dark, satanic mills (even Brisbane was a sleepy, sprawling country town in picturesque contrast to the bustling southern cities of Sydney and Melbourne). Children's novelists capitalised on the mystique of Queensland, archetypal frontier colony, by creating a cluster of tales showing what it was like to be a Queensland kid.

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Owens, Alison, and Donna Lee Brien. "Australian women writers’ popular non-fiction prose in the pre-war period: Exploring their motivations." Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 11, no. 1 (December 1, 2022): 63–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ajpc_00051_1.

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Since the 1970s, feminist scholars have undertaken important critical work on Australian women’s writing of earlier eras, profiling and promoting their fiction. Less attention has been afforded to the popular non-fiction produced by Australian women writers and, in particular, to that produced before the Second World War. Yet this writing is important for several reasons. First, the non-fiction writing of Australian women was voluminous and popular with readers. Second, this popular work critically engaged with a tumultuous political, social and moral landscape in which, as women’s rights were increasingly realized through legislation, the subjectivity of women themselves was fluid and contested. Third, as many of these women were also, or principally, fiction writers, their non-fiction can be shown to have informed and influenced many of their fictional interests, themes and characters. Lastly, and critically, popular non-fiction publication helped to financially sustain many of these writers. In proposing a conceptual framework informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu to analyse examples of this body of work, this article not only suggests that important connections exist between popular and mainstream non-fiction works – newspaper and magazine articles, essays, pamphlets and speeches – and the fictional publications of Australian women writers of the early twentieth century but also suggests that these connections may represent an Australian literary habitus where writing across genre, form and audience was a professional approach that built and sustained literary careers.

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Richards, Isabel, and Anna-Sophie Jürgens. "Being the environment: Conveying environmental fragility and sustainability through Indigenous biocultural knowledge in contemporary Indigenous Australian science fiction." Journal of Science & Popular Culture 4, no. 2 (December 1, 2021): 153–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jspc_00031_1.

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In contemporary Indigenous Australian fiction, all (non-)human animals, plants and the land are interconnected and interdependent. They are aware that they are not in the environment but are the environment. The planet and its non-human inhabitants have a creative agency and capacity for experience that demands our ethical consideration. In this article we investigate how Ambelin Kwaymullina’s Tribe novels and Ellen van Neerven’s novella Water empower environmental awareness by promoting sustainability and protection of the environment – within their fictional worlds and beyond. We argue that the human–nature relationship explored in these science fiction texts conveys the importance of Indigenous biocultural knowledge for resolving twenty-first-century global challenges. We clarify the role of fictional texts in the broader cultural debate on the power and importance of Indigenous biocultural knowledge as a complement to western (scientific) understanding and communication of environmental vulnerability and sustainability. Contemporary Indigenous Australian literature, this article shows, evokes sympathy in readers, inspires an ecocentric view of the world and thus paves the path for a sustainable transformation of society, which has been recognized as the power of fiction. Indigenous Australian fiction texts help us to rethink what it means to be human in terms of our relationship to other living beings and our responsibility to care for our planet in a holistic and intuitive way.

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Courchesne, Jade. "Two Worlds Combined: How Cleverman (2016-2017) Reimagines Indigenous Storytelling." Film Matters 13, no. 2 (September 1, 2022): 60–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/fm_00227_7.

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This article discusses the Australian television drama, Cleverman, a show that blends together science fiction, conventions of the superhero genre, and influences from Indigenous storytelling to yield an honest critique of modern Australian politics. Tackling Australia’s documented history of Indigenous maltreatment while weaving in elements of the Dreaming, the article dissects how Cleverman depicts the legacy of intercultural and intergenerational trauma inflicted upon Indigenous populations, provoking a discourse on how government initiatives continue to have serious, negative repercussions on marginalized communities.

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Leane, Elizabeth, and Stephanie Pfennigwerth. "Antarctica in the Australian imagination." Polar Record 38, no. 207 (October 2002): 309–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s003224740001799x.

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AbstractAntarctica and Australia share a geographical marginality, a commonality that has produced and continues to reinforce historical and political ties between the two continents. Given this close relationship, surprisingly few fulllength novels set in or concerned with the Antarctic have been produced by Australian authors. Until 1990, two latenineteenth- century Utopias, and two novels by Thomas Keneally, were (to our knowledge) the sole representatives of this category. The last decade, however, has seen an upsurge of interest in Antarctica, and a corresponding increase in fictional response. Keneally's novels are ‘literary,’ but these more recent novels cover the gamut of popular genres: science fiction, action-thriller, and romance. Furthermore, they indicate a change in the perception of Antarctica and its place within international relations. Whereas Keneally is primarily concerned with the psychology of the explorer from the ‘Heroic Age,’ these younger Australian writers are interested in contemporary political, social, and environmental issues surrounding the continent. Literary critics have hitherto said little about textual representations of Antarctica; this paper opens a space for analysis of ‘Antarctic fiction,’ and explores the changing nature of Australian-Antarctic relations as represented by Australian writers.

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James, Kathryn. "'There's a Black Boy Dead and a Migloo Holding a Gun': Death, Aboriginality and History in Australian Adolescent Literature." Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature 19, no. 1 (January 1, 2009): 5–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.21153/pecl2009vol19no1art1153.

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In 'Preying on the past: Contexts of some recent neo-historical fiction', Peter Pierce argues that, over the last five or so decades, Australian historical fiction has turned away from 'unconstrained and idealistic affirmations about Australia's future' to empathise instead with those figures in the historical landscape who were previously marginalised: 'victims of imperialism, patriarchy, racism, capitalism' (1992, p.307). This trend is particularly applicable to historical literature for younger readers, which now often tries to renegotiate history by providing a counterpoint to the metanarratives of the past (Stephens 2003, xii-xiii). Reflecting and responding to developments in the disciplines of historiography and, more generally, the humanities, texts in this genre are representative of the attempt to interrogate monolithic versions of Australian history - often called the 'three cheers' view - in which positivity, achievement and the peaceful settlement of the nation are key themes. At issue in these novels is thus the redressing of past wrongs, particularly with respects to the violent aspects of colonisation when so many members of the Indigenous population either died or were forcibly displaced. Each of the three adolescent novels I focus upon in this paper - Melissa Lucashenko's 'Killing Darcy' (1998), Gary Crew's 'No Such Country' (1991) and Mark Svendsen's 'Poison Under Their Lips' (2001) - is equally idiosyncratic in its approach to narrativising Australia's problematic colonial past.

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Zinnatullina, Zulfiya R. "The ‘Internal’ Other in John Fowles’s Works." Вестник Пермского университета. Российская и зарубежная филология 14, no. 4 (2022): 85–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.17072/2073-6681-2022-4-85-93.

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The problem of the national is among the main ones in works by English writer John Fowles. This can be seen both in his fiction works and essays. This article discusses the role of the image of the ‘internal’ Other in the process of building his concept of ‘Englishness’. In his essay On Being English but Not British, the writer analyzes the relations between Englishmen and the inhabitants of Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland, and puts the latter on a par with Australians and Americans, however, pointing out their interdependence with the English. The Welshmen Henry Breasley and David Jones act as the ‘internal’ Other in The Ebony Tower and A Maggot. They are endowed with typical Welsh characteristics such as a penchant for drinking, greed, and cunning. Both characters are presented through the perception of English characters, which allows the author to play with the stereotypes about the Welsh circulating among the English. There is an Irishman Dr. Grogan in the novel The French Lieutenant’s Woman. The protagonist Charles Smithson also attributes to him traits of the Irish national character such as talkativeness, foolishness, frivolity. At the same time, Grogan acts as a kind of arbiter, trying to explain the behavior of the characters from a scientific point of view. In Daniel Martin, actress Jenny appeals to her Scottish roots, but she does not take it seriously. That is why the main character also endows her with stereotypical features. However, she subsequently abandons them for the sake of ‘Americanness’, thus losing her identity. ‘Internal’ Others do not play a significant role in the writer’s conception of national identity. The writer focuses on the English characters, making the internal ‘others’ a kind of backdrop for them.

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Bootle, Sandi. ""The Greens" and "Green Fire"." Pacific Conservation Biology 3, no. 4 (1997): 403. http://dx.doi.org/10.1071/pc980403.

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"The Greens", written by Bob Brown and Peter Singer introduces the Greens to a wide audience. Both authors were Green candidates for the Australian Senate at the time of writing. Bob Brown is one of the founders of the Australian Greens. As director of the Tasmanian Wilderness Society, he led the campaign that saved the Franklin River from impoundment for a hydroelectric scheme, and was a member of the Tasmanian parliament from 1983?93. Brown was voted Australian of the Year in 1993 by The Australian newspaper, and in 1990 won the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize. Peter Singer is Australia's leading public philosopher and the author of award winning and best selling non-fiction Animal Liberation and How are We to Live? At the time of writing he was Professor of Philosophy and Deputy Director of the Centre for Human Bioethics at Monash University, Melbourne.

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WILSON, KIM. "The Past Re-imagined: Memory and Representations of Power in Historical Fiction for Children." International Research in Children's Literature 1, no. 2 (December 2008): 111–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/ircl.2008.0001.

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This article argues that historical fiction functions as a collective memory: it provides a social framework for recollections that speak of a national agenda often through personal experiences. Taking as its examples three Australian and New Zealand fictions for children and young adults, from the late twentieth and early twentieth-first century, the article examines texts that focus on how we remember the past and what aspects of that past should be remembered: Memorial (1999), a picture book by Gary Crew (author) and Shaun Tan (illustrator), The Divine Wind (1998) by Garry Disher, and The Swap (2004) by Wendy Catran. Close analysis of these texts suggests that, like memory itself, historical fiction tends to eulogise the past. In historical fiction, for children especially, whilst power relations of cultural significance can be perpetuated, they can also be re-positioned or re-invented in order to re-imagine the past. Shifts in the present understanding of past power relationships contribute towards the reinvention of race relations, national ideologies and the locus of political dissent. The article concludes that historical fiction, because of its simultaneous claim to fact and imagination, can be a powerful and cunning mode of propaganda.

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Rodríguez-Salas, Gerardo. "Communitarian Theory and Andalusian Imagery in Carmel Bird’s Fiction. An Interview." IRIS, no. 35 (June 30, 2014): 123–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.35562/iris.1803.

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Australian writer Carmel Bird writes fiction that, while being highly individual and varied, settles within the Australian traditions of both Peter Carey’s fabulism and Thea Astley’s humane wit. As William H. Wilde, Joy Hooton and Barry Andrews state (1994), Bird is a “witty writer with a wide but always highly original tonal range”, who “raises what is often potentially sinister or horrific to something approaching comedy. Disease, deaths and violence are staples in her fictional world, which has similarities with Barbara Hanrahan’s Gothic sensuality and feminist irony, although Bird’s deadpan humour is a distinctive, determining element”. The present interview focuses on an unexplored area in Bird—Andalusia, Spain—which, paradoxically, becomes the backcloth of some of her fiction—like the recent Child of the Twilight (2010)—and a prolific source of inspiration. The following pages explore Bird’s Andalusian/Spanish visions as regards nationalistic, religious, and cultural constructions. To that end, the theoretical communitarian discussion of figures like Ernest Gellner, Ferdinand Tönnies, Benedict Anderson, Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot will prove useful in the structural framework of this interview. Bird herself clarifies that her contribution is not offered from an academic perspective; she speaks about herself as a writer largely unaffected by academic bias. However, communitarian theorisation will prove useful in clarifying her depiction of nationalistic and religious values, while, in the process, she sheds some light on the slippery concept of “Australian writing” and the construction of Spanish cultural values from the perspective of an Australian writer. This interview offers a fresh rendition marked by the humorous, spontaneous and truthful tone that characterises Bird’s fiction.

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Walsh, Pete. "What ifs and idle daydreaming: The creative processes of Andrew McGahan." Queensland Review 23, no. 1 (May 31, 2016): 62–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/qre.2016.7.

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AbstractAndrew McGahan is one of Queensland's most successful novelists. Over the past 23 years, he has published six adult novels and three novels in his Ship Kings series for young adults. McGahan's debut novel, Praise (1992), won the Vogel National Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript, Last Drinks (2000) won the Ned Kelly Award for Crime Writing, and The White Earth went on to win the Miles Franklin Literary Award, The Age Book of the Year Award and the Courier-Mail Book of the Year Award, and was shortlisted for the Queensland Premier's Literary Awards. In 2009, Wonders of a Godless World earned McGahan the Best Science Fiction Novel in the Aurealis Awards for Excellence in Australian Speculative Fiction. McGahan's unashamedly open critiques of Australian, and specifically Queensland, society have imbued his works with a sense of place and space that is a unique trait of his writing. In this interview, McGahan allows us a brief visit into the mind of one of Australia's pre-eminent contemporary authors, shedding light on the ‘what ifs’ and ‘idle daydreaming’ that have pushed his ideas from periphery to page.

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Vijayasekaran, P., and G. Alan. "The Future of Colonialism in Australian Indigenous Fiction – A Psychoanalytic Study of Trauma in The Swan Book and Terra Nullius." Theory and Practice in Language Studies 12, no. 8 (August 1, 2022): 1664–68. http://dx.doi.org/10.17507/tpls.1208.25.

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The goal of this study is to examine the colonial concerns depicted in the futuristic Australian fictions Terra Nullius and The Swan Book. The Swan Book, a 2013 Australian novel by Alexis Wright, digs deeply into subjects like climate catastrophes and the repressive condition of the natives in a future Australia. Claire G. Coleman's fantasy novel Terra Nullius, on the other hand, presents a futuristic Australia in which many colonial themes are subtly and implicitly depicted. This research article aims to emphasize the aftermath effects of colonization and to put together how they are thinking about Australia’s problems in the future by analyzing the two novels of these indigenous authors using important psychoanalytic theories. This study also highlights the impact of magic realism in these texts.

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Matek, Ljubica. "Australian Aboriginal SF – Blending Genre and Literary Fiction: A Review of Futuristic Worlds in Australian Aboriginal Fiction by Iva Polak." ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries 15, no. 1 (April 18, 2018): 129–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/elope.15.1.129-131.

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The fact that Iva Polak’s monograph Futuristic Worlds in Australian Aboriginal Fiction is the first volume in Peter Lang’s World Science Fiction Studies series, edited by Sonja Fritzsche, is symbolic of the actual novelty and relevance of Polak’s work. It is, in fact, the first book-length study in English dedicated to the analysis of Australian Aboriginal fiction from the point of view of the theory of the fantastic.

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Renes, Cornelis M. B. "Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book: Indigenous-Australian Swansong or Songline?" Humanities 10, no. 3 (July 15, 2021): 89. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/h10030089.

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The Swan Book (pub. 2013) by the Indigenous-Australian author Alexis Wright is an eco-dystopian epic about the Indigenous people’s tough struggle to regain the environmental balance of the Australian continent and recover their former habitat. The book envisions a dire future in which all Australian flora and fauna—humans included—are under threat, suffering, displaced, and dying out as the result of Western colonization and its exploitative treatment of natural resources. The Swan Book goes beyond the geographical and epistemological scope of Wright’s previous two novels, Plains of Promise (pub. 1997) and Carpentaria (pub. 2006) to imagine what the Australian continent at large will look like under the ongoing pressure of the Western, exploitative production mode in a foreseeable future. The occupation of Aboriginal land in Australia’s Northern Territory since 2007 has allowed the federal government to intervene dramatically in what they term the dysfunctional remote Aboriginal communities; these are afflicted by transgenerational trauma, endemic domestic violence, alcoholism, and child sexual and substance abuse—in themselves the results of the marginal status of Indigeneity in Australian society—and continued control over valuable resources. This essay will discuss how Wright’s dystopian novel exemplifies an Indigenous turn to speculative fiction as a more successful way to address the trials and tribulations of Indigenous Australia and project a better future—an enabling songline rather than a disabling swansong.

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Brown, Ruth, and Michael Wilding. "Studies in Classic Australian Fiction." Yearbook of English Studies 29 (1999): 337. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/3509005.

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Kerry, Stephen Craig. "Australian Queer Science Fiction Fans." Journal of Homosexuality 66, no. 1 (November 7, 2017): 100–116. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00918369.2017.1395262.

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Rooney, Brigid, and Michael Wilding. "Studies in Classic Australian Fiction." Labour History, no. 76 (1999): 187. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/27516642.

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Potter, Troy. "Ghosts of Australia Past: Postcolonial Haunting in Australian Adolescent Mystery Novels." International Research in Children's Literature 8, no. 2 (December 2015): 185–200. http://dx.doi.org/10.3366/ircl.2015.0167.

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This essay explores the use of haunting in two Australian adolescent mystery novels, Victor Kelleher's Baily's Bones (1988) and Anthony Eaton's A New Kind of Dreaming (2001). Both novels mobilise the mystery genre as a means to interrogate Australia's colonial past and neocolonial present. The function of the spatial environments in which the novels take place and the construction and function of haunting in each novel is interrogated. It is argued that haunting is figured as a disruptive process whereby the repressed colonial scene intrudes on the present, such that the haunting the teenage protagonists experience encourages them to enquire into the past. While on the one hand the novels advocate a renewed interrogation of Australia's past in order to develop a more comprehensive understanding of the present, a closer reading of the texts reveals that the novels fail to sustain their postcolonial endeavours. Thus, while adolescent mystery fiction is a genre that can be mobilised in the name of postcolonial enquiry, the difficulty of doing so effectively is illustrative of the wider challenge of achieving decolonisation.

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Spiers, Amy. "#MirandaMustGo: Contesting a settler colonial obsession with lost-in-the-bush myths through public and socially engaged art." Art & the Public Sphere 8, no. 2 (December 1, 2019): 217–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/aps_00022_1.

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In January 2017, settler Australian artist, Amy Spiers, launched a creative campaign to contest habitual associations at the site of Hanging Rock in Central Victoria with a white vanishing myth. Entitled #MirandaMustGo, the campaign’s objective was to provoke thought and unease about why the missing white schoolgirls of Joan Lindsay’s fictional novel, Picnic at Hanging Rock, prompted more attention and feeling in the general public than the actual losses of lives, land and culture experienced by Indigenous people in the region as a consequence of rapid and violent colonial occupation. The campaign incited significant media attention, substantial public debate and some reconsideration of the stories told at Hanging Rock. In this article, Spiers will describe how she conceptualized the artwork/campaign as a propositional counter-memorial action that attempted to conceive ways in which non-Indigenous Australians can acknowledge, and take responsibility for, the denial of colonization’s impact on Indigenous people. She will do so by discussing the critical methodology that underpinned this socially engaged artwork and continue by analysing the public reception and dissensus the campaign provoked. She will conclude in presenting some thoughts about what #MirandaMustGo produced: a rupture of the public secret of Australia’s violent colonial past, a marked shift to the discourse concerning Hanging Rock and an ongoing, unresolved agitation stimulated by Picnic at Hanging Rock’s persistent reproducibility.

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Hale, Frederick. "Universal Salvation in a Universal Language? Trevor Steele’s Kaj staros tre alte." Religion & Theology 20, no. 1-2 (2013): 19–35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15743012-12341249.

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Abstract Extensive secularisation in Europe and several other parts of the world in recent decades has not diminished the attractiveness of Jesus as a theme in contemporary fiction internationally. Fictional biographies of him continue to appear in many languages. Among the novelists who have tapped their imaginations to fill in gaps in the canonical gospels and construct a Jesus who fits their own agenda is the Australian Trevor Steele. His work of 2006, Kaj staros tre alte, presents Jesus as essentially a supernaturally gifted healer but also as a teacher of universal brotherhood. Steele argues that the effectiveness of Jesus was severely limited by contemporary notions of Jewish apocalypticism and Messianism. Steele’s literary device for providing extra-biblical information about Jesus is a manuscript purportedly written by a Roman tax officer who was stationed in Caesarea approximately a decade after the Crucifixion. Discovered in 2001, this Greek text forms the fictional basis of Kaj staros tre alte.

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Sean McMullen. "Australian Science Fiction in the Sixties." Antipodes 27, no. 1 (2013): 73. http://dx.doi.org/10.13110/antipodes.27.1.0073.

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Jean-François Vernay. "The Ringside View of Australian Fiction." Antipodes 31, no. 1 (2017): 38. http://dx.doi.org/10.13110/antipodes.31.1.0038.

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Pridmore, Saxby. "Suicide in 19th-century Australian fiction." Australian & New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 51, no. 10 (April 4, 2017): 1058–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0004867417699475.

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Tilney, Martin. "Covert modernist techniques in Australian fiction." Language, Context and Text 1, no. 2 (July 22, 2019): 313–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/langct.00013.til.

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Abstract Peter Carey’s short story American dreams (Carey 1994 [1974]) presents a recalibration of consciousness as a small Australian town gradually becomes Americanized. The text foregrounds epistemological concerns by demonstrating a clear tendency toward delayed understanding. For this reason, I argue that the story is an instance of modernist fiction: a label not previously applied to Carey’s stories. In contrast with popular modernist techniques such as free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness, the techniques presented in the text appear to be covert, which may at least partially explain why the story has managed to avoid being labelled modernist by literary critics until now. Using analytical tools grounded in systemic functional grammar and appraisal categories, I demonstrate how linguistic analysis can lay bare the covert modernist techniques at work in the story, indicating that such an approach can be a useful complement to non-linguistic literary criticism.

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Klik, Lukas. "The Mabo Turn in Australian Fiction." Journal of Australian Studies 42, no. 4 (October 2, 2018): 540–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14443058.2018.1542939.

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Xu, Daozhi. "Australian Children’s Literature and Postcolonialism: A Review Essay." Ilha do Desterro A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies 69, no. 2 (June 7, 2016): 193. http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2016v69n2p193.

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http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-8026.2016v69n2p193The theme of land and country is resonant in Australian children’s literature with Aboriginal subject matter. The textual and visual narratives present counter-discourse strategies to challenge the colonial ideology and dominant valuation of Australian landscape. This paper begins by examining the colonial history of seeing Australia as an “empty space”, naming, and appropriating the land by erasing Aboriginal presence from the land. Then it explores the conceptual re-investment of Aboriginal connections to country in the representation of Australian landscape, as reflected and re-imagined in fiction and non-fiction for child readers. Thereby, as the paper suggests, a shared and reconciliatory space can at least discursively be negotiated and envisioned.

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Birns, Nicholas. "Introduction to John Kinsella's PINK LAKE." Thesis Eleven 155, no. 1 (December 2019): 3–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0725513619892170.

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John Kinsella’s fiction emphasizes similar themes of environmental activism, political protest, and critique of Australian society, as does his widely acclaimed poetry. As in his verse, his orientation as a fiction writer is both local and global, regional and cosmopolitan. But in his fiction Kinsella engages in a double interrogation of both mainstream society and his own posture in opposition to it. In the novella Pink Lake a film director is interviewed by an uncomprehending journalist and driven to desperation by the philistinism of Australian society. But his own arrogance, unexamined white and male privilege, and illusion that just because he practices what he calls cinema vérité he has in fact attained the truth mean that he is part of the problem as well. Kinsella examines the problematics of social critique in a neoliberal world, noting their ironies while still believing in their possibility and necessity.

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Setecka, Agnieszka. "“Gold … Was Certainly Very Attractive; But He Did Not Like New South Wales as a Country in Which to Live.” The Representation of Australian Society in Trollope’s John Caldigate." Studia Anglica Posnaniensia 52, no. 4 (December 20, 2017): 395–408. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/stap-2017-0017.

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Abstract Australia features in numerous Victorian novels either as a place of exile or a land of new opportunities, perhaps the most memorable image of the country having been presented in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861). Anthony Trollope’s writing, however, offers a much more extensive and complex presentation of Australian life as seen by a Victorian English gentleman. In his Australian fictions, including Harry Heathcote of Gangoil (1874), Catherine Carmichael (1878), and John Caldigate (1879), he presents Australia both as a land of new opportunities and as a place where social hierarchy as it is known in England is upturned and social boundaries either disregarded or drawn along different lines. The present article is concerned with the ways in which Trollope’s John Caldigate represents differences in the structure of English and Australian society, stressing the latter’s lack of a clear class hierarchy characteristic of social organisation “back home”. The society of Australia is presented as extremely plastic and mobile - both in terms of space and structure. Consequently, it can hardly be contained within a stiffly defined hierarchy, and it seems to defy the rules of social organisation that are accepted as natural and obvious in England. In Trollope’s fiction success in Australia depends to a large extent on hard work, ability to withstand the hardships of life with no luxuries, and thrift, and thus on personal virtues, but the author nevertheless suggests that it is defined solely by economic capital at the cost of cultural capital, so significant in England.

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Frank, Helen. "Discovering Australia Through Fiction: French Translators as Aventuriers." Meta 51, no. 3 (September 21, 2006): 482–503. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/013554ar.

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Abstract The translation into French of referents of Australia and Australianness in fiction necessitates a considerable variety of translational tendencies and interpretive choices. This study focuses on French translations of selected passages and blurbs from Australian fiction set in regional Australia to determine how referents of Australian flora, fauna, landscape and people are translated and interpreted in a non-English speaking cultural system. Guided by concerns for the target readers’ understanding of the text, French translators employ normative strategies and adaptive procedures common to translation to enhance reader orientation. There is, nonetheless, evidence of culture-specific appropriation of the text and systematic manipulation of Australian referents that goes beyond normative solutions. Such appropriation and manipulation stem from a desire to create and foster culture-specific suppositions about Australia consistent with French preoccupations with colonialism, the exotic, exploration and adventure.

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Wilson, Kim. "Abjection in Contemporary Australian Young Adult Fiction." Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature 11, no. 3 (December 1, 2001): 24–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.21153/pecl2001vol11no3art1325.

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Ackland, Michael. "Australian Fiction and the Lure of Painting." Le Simplegadi 21, no. 23 (2023): 37–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.17456/simple-210.

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Questo saggio studia il perché i pittori, le tecniche pittoriche e i temi legati all’arte siano presenti nella narrativa australiana dal colonialismo ad oggi. La pittura infatti ha rivestito a lungo un ruolo importante nei diari dei coloni e nella loro narrativa, diventando un emblema dei dilemmi rivelatori e delle ispirazioni condivise dagli autori. In breve, viene dimostrato come l’arte pittorica sia stata scelta come Arte Sorella della scrittura antipodea dei bianchi.

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Carter, David. "The literary field and contemporary trade-book publishing in Australia: Literary and genre fiction." Media International Australia 158, no. 1 (January 7, 2016): 48–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1329878x15622078.

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This article examines fiction as a major sector of trade-book publishing in exploring the place of Australian publishing within a globalised industry and marketplace. It traces the function of ‘literary fiction’ as industry category and locus of symbolic value and national cultural capital, mapping its structures and dynamics in Australia, including the impact of digital technologies. In policy terms, literature and publishing remain significant sites of national and state government investment. Following Bourdieu’s model of the field of cultural production, the literary/publishing field is presented as exemplary rather than as a high-cultural exception in the cultural economy. Taking Thompson’s use of field theory to examine US and UK trade publishing into account, it analyses the industry structures governing literary and genre fiction in Australia, demonstrating the field’s logic as determined by the unequal distribution of large, medium-sized and small publishers. This analysis reveals distinctive features of the Australian situation within a transnational context.

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Collins‐Gearing, Brooke. "Imagining Indigenality in Romance and Fantasy Fiction for Children." Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature 13, no. 3 (December 1, 2003): 32–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.21153/pecl2003vol13no3art1284.

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Romance and fantasy fiction by non-Indigenous authors from the nineteenth through to the twentieth century positions non-Indigenous readers as the natural, normal inhabitants of the Australian nation through strategies of appropriation and indigenisation. At the same time, these narratives exclude Indigenous children from the category 'Australian children' and construct narrators as experts on Aboriginal culture and traditions.

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Stockwell, Peter. "Schema Poetics and Speculative Cosmology." Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 12, no. 3 (August 2003): 252–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/09639470030123005.

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Speculative cosmology is a sub-genre of science fiction that particularly focuses on the difficulties for the deployment of existing knowledge in reading. This article assesses the usefulness of competing models of world-monitoring in order to arrive at a usable framework for discussing the particular issues in science fictional reading. It is suggested that schema theory, while containing many flaws in general, nevertheless offers an appropriate degree of delicacy for the exploration of sf. Schema poetics - the application of the theory to the literary context - is used to discuss speculative cosmology, with a focus on the work of the Australian sf writer Greg Egan. The analysis investigates the connection between stylistic form and schema operation, and proposes an explanation of `plausibility'. Specifically, sf tends to provide a readerly counterpart in the text, and thereby dramatizes schema refreshment as if it were mere schema accretion.

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M.M., National University of Malaysia (UKM), Raihanah, Hamoud Yahya Ahmed, National University of Malaysia (UKM), and Ruzy Suliza Hashim, National University of Malaysia (UKM). "A Handful of Soil: An Ecocritical Reading of Land in Randa Abdel-Fattahâ€™s <i>Where the Streets Had a Name<i/>." Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature 8, no. 2 (December 15, 2014): 137–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.31436/asiatic.v8i2.493.

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This article explores how Randa Abdel-Fattah (1979-), a Palestinian-Egyptian Australian diasporic writer, engages with the land as being ecocritically functional in her Palestinian-centred novel Where the Streets Had a Name (2008). The premise of the article is that a fictional representation of the Palestinian struggle for emancipation against occupation can be read for its environmental concerns; in particular, for the representation of the intersections of nature and culture. To this end, the article proposes a tripartite approach in reading politics of environment in the narrative by focusing on the effects of land on mind, body and voice. The analysis is carried out through the lens of ecocriticism and it reveals the symbiotic interconnections between humans and land. The findings reveal that the crisis experienced by the Palestinians in Abdel-Fattah's fiction goes beyond the need to preserve their past as the land has strong implications on their present state of mind, body and voice.

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Guttfeld, Dorotta. "Australian Science Fiction: in Search of the “Feel”." Zeitschrift für Australienstudien / Australian Studies Journal 2122 (2008): 65–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.35515/zfa/asj.2122/200708.08.

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Kačer, Tomáš. "Czech translations and receptions of contemporary Australian fiction." Journal of Postcolonial Writing 58, no. 1 (January 2, 2022): 51–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2021.1994755.

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Driscoll, Beth, Lisa Fletcher, Kim Wilkins, and David Carter. "The publishing ecosystems of contemporary australian genre fiction." Creative Industries Journal 11, no. 2 (May 4, 2018): 203–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17510694.2018.1480851.

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Love, Glen A. "Australian Short Fiction: A History by Bruce Bennett." Western American Literature 38, no. 3 (2003): 320–21. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/wal.2003.0073.

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Brien, Donna Lee. "Beyond sun, sea and sand: Bondi Beach in Australian popular writing." Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 10, no. 1 (December 1, 2021): 103–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ajpc_00041_1.

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This article surveys book-length writing for a general readership about one of Australia’s most well-known and popular beaches, Sydney’s Bondi Beach. Having located narratives about Bondi Beach in a range of popular fiction and non-fiction writing, this investigation uses thematic analysis to examine these publications. Ten themes were identified in this analysis, revealing not only the wide range of topics related to Bondi Beach that are of interest to writers but also a series of tensions across these representations, as well as what is missing across these volumes.

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Jordan, Deborah. "Vance and Nettie Palmer in Caloundra, 1925–29: The regional turn." Queensland Review 24, no. 2 (November 17, 2017): 180–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/qre.2017.29.

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AbstractVance and Nettie Palmer were among Australia's most important literary partnerships. Previous accounts of their life and work underplay their commitment to the creation of an environmental imagination. After the trauma and disillusion of the Great War, they lived in Caloundra from 1925 to 1929 (and from then had an ongoing connection). While it is generally acknowledged how important their time there was in terms of Vance's emerging work in literary fiction, and through Nettie's work as a freelance journalist, what has not been addressed is their extraordinary environmental writings about the region. Regional writings were largely dismissed in the 1990s as of comparative insignificance to national narratives — just as today the reputation of the inter-war writers, those associated with the Palmers, is at a low ebb. During the 1920s, Nettie developed critical categories to accommodate a double standard in Australian writing: regional and universal literature. She went on to argue for the support of writing in Australia at the regional level. Vance reflected on his explorations of place directly in a series of articles. This paper reframes the Palmers’ Caloundra work in the ‘bio-regional’ terms of climate change and the historical cultural imaginary.

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Mather, Philippe. "Intercultural sensitivity in Orientalist cinema." East Asian Journal of Popular Culture 6, no. 2 (August 1, 2020): 177–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/eapc_00024_1.

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Edward Said’s dogmas of Orientalism are a succinct summary of western perceptions of the East, which reveal an essentially racist discourse that also speaks to the westerner’s self-perception. While there is a tendency in fiction film to polarize attitudes as either friendly or hostile, for reasons of narrative economy and to enhance dramatic conflict, this article argues that it is possible to measure the behaviour of fictional characters on a continuum describing intercultural sensitivity to assess how these characters appear to respond to the idea of cultural differences, broadly ranging from the most ethnocentric views to more ethnorelative ones. Since the intercultural development continuum (IDC) is structured as five developmental stages, it provides a finer psychological template than Orientalist binaries, offering a more nuanced view of character motivations and attitudes. The IDC scale is ideally suited to narrative analysis as it usefully describes successive stages that characters may exhibit throughout the course of a story depicting intercultural exchanges. The IDC allows the analyst to gauge the degree of conformance of any given film to Said’s aforementioned dogmas, particularly those films that either express an ambivalent attitude or appear superficially more enlightened or accommodating of difference. This model will be illustrated with a number of case studies selected from a filmography focusing on western representations of Singapore in film and television, from 1940 to 2015, including titles such as the Bette Davis plantation melodrama The Letter, the science fiction thriller Hitman: Agent 47 and the Australian period TV series Serangoon Road.

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Journal articles on the topic 'Australians, fiction'

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