Philip Mead

These notes on Alexis Wright's fiction are about issues within (and beyond) Indigenous intellectual and political life in contemporary Australia that her fiction seems to address in imaginative and narrative ways. They're predominantly contextual rather than interpretative. In the context of our MLA panel (9 January 2015) on Wright's '(other)worldly' fiction I offered these contextual considerations, working from the outside in, as intended to assist with reading The Swan Book (2013), particularly for a non-Australian readership; a reading from the inside out would include consideration of Indigenous storytelling modes and their adaptation of dystopian generics, and the thematics of climate theft and ecological racism (see Rose). The Swan Book and Carpentaria (2006) currently circulate as world novels where they have a powerful and distinctive presence as complex literary narratives within transnational Indigenous and, to a lesser degree, non-Indigenous literary ...

Neill’s account of the fate of Australian literary studies concentrated on the situation at James Cook and Sydney universities rather than attempting any broader survey of the production of literary knowledge in tertiary institutions. Literary studies at university level is conducted, in fact, across a complexly articulated set of disciplinary fields, that are in constant, fluctuating response to the declining ‘market’ value of a purist literary education, within university course structures and therefore funding regimes, and society more broadly.

An edited selection of Kenneth Slessor's film criticism appearing in Smith's Weekly. The selected reviews were published between 1933–1936 and were chosen by the editors to give the reader a sense of the range of Slessor's interests and his critical acumen.

Australian film critics have not been well represented either by Australian film studies, or by Australian letters, the two branches of scholarship we might expect to attend to them. While a number of film critics are featured in that compendium of notable Australians, The Australian Dictionary of Biography (ADB), in many entries film criticism is mentioned sparingly, sublimated to the writer’s other achievements in letters. Australia’s first wave of significant film critics, who came to prominence in the 1930s – Beatrice Tildesley, Erle Cox, Josephine O’Neill, and Kenneth Slessor – are now with the exception of O’Neill not usually remembered as film critics. In the case of Kenneth Slessor there is no mention whatsoever of film criticism in his ADB entry. Moreover there is no film criticism collected in the anthologies of Slessor’s journalism, and there is scant mention of film criticism in the oral histories and biographies that cover his journalistic life. It is ironic that, of any of these names, Slessor’s film criticism in particular should be so neglected. As we will show in this article, Slessor has a compelling claim to being Australia’s first great film critic.

Abstract For John Kinsella place and space, with all their historical, cultural, political, geographical, epistemic and environmental dimensions, are explicitly constitutive of his writing. But the ruling imaginary of this writing is “displacement,” the problems and paradoxes of home, country, travel, knowledge, ecology, activism that characterise his critical and poetic engagements. From multiple angles Kinsella’s writing anatomises the unsettledness of Australian history and consciousness, but it also conceives of these national dimensions in inter- and transnational terms. Kinsella is always concerned to show place, belonging and “international regionalism” alive in negotiations with the writing of any location, of all social and biological environments. Further his work reflects an activist politics of knowledge, with its recognition that a broad knowledge of locality needs to critique “Place” studies and discourses from privileged institutions of learning that fail to acknowledge the place-knowledge of communities that do not have access to means of articulating what makes their “local” knowledge relevant, dynamic and essential to themselves as well as to the wider world. At the same time, this critical discourse is shadowed by the affective realities of displacement, of never being able to be at home.

IN A 2006 ARTICLE in the Australian which appeared under one of Tracey Moffatt's images from her 1998 photographic exhibition, "Up in the Sky," Marcia Langton began by recalling two events of that year that had rekindled her interest in "the complicated relationship, ranging from the brutally and pragmatically financial to the highly emotional that Australians have had with the mining industry":And they framed the question of how we will understand the new boom and the way mining is still changing Australia.In April, the media broadcast every detail of the Beaconsfield mine tragedy in Tasmania, from the impact of the death of Larry Knight on the community to the emotion and heroism of the tense and laboriously slow 14-day rescue of Todd Russell and Brant Webb. As if I had read about them in a novel, I now have an odd imaginary relationship with a small Tasmanian mining town and the two fortunate men rescued from its mine.The previous month [March] I was struck by the death of artist and sculptor Pro Hart. A miner in his youth, Hart lived most of his life in the mining city of Broken Hill in far western NSW, where he painted the people and streetscapes, the landscapes and the mines. Long ignored by urban art industry elites as merely a naive artist, Hart struck a chord with ordinary Australians, especially the mining folk who were his subjects. After his death, the print and broadcast media provided tributes to his life that repeatedly reminded us of the irony that 1he National Gallery of Australia does not own a single work by Australia's most popular artist.'Langton recalls Moffatt's images of the "obliquely referenced" Broken Hill landscapes - "no romance under the big western skies [...] only discontented souls, treeless gullies, the highway, storm drains and corrugated-iron shacks" - in connection with her experience of the mediatized Beaconsfield drama and the news of Pro Hart's death. Her article speculates on the aesthetic and social contradictions she perceives in these two events and that have their resonances in her own history of growing up as an Aboriginal person in southern Queensland, and in her knowledge of the history of mining in Australia. The tensions run deep. Moffatt's photographs, "acute [studies] of the edges of an imagined mining landscape and society," were in fact commissioned by New York's Dia Art Foundation and therefore circulate within a globalized contemporary art world, which includes the internationally oriented Roslyn Oxley9 gallery in Sydney, where the series was first exhibited. The "Up in the Sky" series is highly allusive and technically innovative photographic work, including the image that heads the Australian article of a "beefed-up Amazonian chick swinging a mallet on top of a bumt-out car." While overall the impact of Moffatt's series for Langton is "apocalyptic and banal," she also recognizes the "mise en scene" as "undeniably Australian, [...] the desiccated inland, hinting at history and the new global citizens" of a resource-industriesdriven economy. All the same, as Langton feels, Moffatt's work is as distant as possible on the spectrum of Australian cultural expression from the work of tiie "non-urban and naive" Pro Hart, however much they both might reference the landscape of Broken Hill. Back in 1989, Langton had played a leading role in Moffatt's "rural tragedy" Night Cries, her short film that, like "Up in the Sky," is in dialogue with international media history and avant-garde image-making.2 So Langton clearly feels implicated in the "urban art industry elites" that have spumed Pro Hart just as she feels that the experience of the Beaconsfield miners, as miners, is "alien."Motivated by such contemporary contradictions, "dualities" she calls them, Langton ranges widely across Australian literature, historiography, film, and art - from Fred Williams's Conzinc Riotinto commissions (the Pilbara and western Cape York landscapes), to Geoffrey Blarney's history of the gold rushes (and S. …

ABSTRACT This article provides a personal and anecdotal reflection on the question of a future for Australian studies. It briefly recounts the history and signification of the interdisciplinary descriptor “Australian studies” and its political and social context from the late 1980s. In particular, it emphasises the importance of Indigenous and constitutional foundations to any new Australian studies and its shaping of knowledge. The anecdotal topics I explore include Indigenous writers, the national capital's inflection of Australian studies, Garma, Global South film studies and Australia's geographical relations to the Pacific, the Indian Ocean and the North. It argues that modelling a new Australian studies needs to countenance the idea that Australia has to be begun again.

ABSTRACT The recent “Uluru Statement from the Heart” (May, 2017), and the Final Report of the Referendum Council (June, 2017) are significant expressions of a rapidly evolving discourse on sovereignty in Australia. Alexis Wright's The Swan Book (2013) is a futuristic meditation on the limits of sovereignty from an Indigenous perspective: what if national borders disappear under the rising waters of global warming? What if national governments are superseded by global rule? The Swan Book explores these scenarios in a complex interplay of utopian and dystopian modes. This article argues that Alexis Wright's work is an instance of how the Indigenous world novel can address real world issues of anthropocene futures, Indigenous rights and national sovereignty.

... Philip Mead: Death and Home-work: The Origins of ... Author: Philip Mead Title: Death and Home-work: The Origins of Narrative in The Fortunes of Richard Mahony Journal: Australian Literary Studies Imprint: October 1995, Volume 17, Number 2, Pages 115-134 ...

Malcolm Knox’s Boom: The Underground History of Australia, from Gold Rush to GFC is an attempt to understand the apparent contradictions about mining in Australian history and in what he calls the ‘national mindset’. Knox’s starting point is his hypothesis that ‘mining is, in a way that has not been properly understood or appreciated, integral to Australians’ perception of themselves […] mining is, in a metaphoric sense, woven into the national DNA’. Yet while Australians have been ‘formed by mining culturally and intellectually, as well as economically,’ its history remains shadowy, and for the majority of the populace mining remains a geographically remote, ‘abstract’ and ‘disembodied’ enterprise, ‘lacking in folk heroes’.

LITERARY biography has both its friends and its enemies. Readers of the genre may be fans of particular authors, or may be addicted to literary biography in general, or perhaps both. The evidence of literary festivals and public libraries is that these readers are a numerous ...

review of A History of the Book in Australia 1891-1945: A National Culture in a Colonised Market. Eds Martin Lyons and John Arnold. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2001. Paper Empires: A History of the Book in Australia 1946-2005. Eds Craig Munro and Robyn Sheahan-Bright. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2006. Making Books: Contemporary Australian Publishing. Eds David Carter and Anne Galligan. St Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2007.

... opening keynote on digital resourcing, a topic of relevance in this Web 2 age, was presented ... do you teach Australian poetry (Parr and Bellis, Cassidy, Plunkett) • How might students be encouraged ... Brady, N.(2011)'Uni brought to book for snub to local literature', Sunday Age 21 ...

... Objective Division: Cultural Understanding. Objective Group: Communication. Objective Field: Languages and Literature. Creator: Mead, P (Associate Professor Philip Mead). ID Code: 43979. Year Published: In Press. Deposited By: English, Journalism and European Languages ...