Antipodes articles from December 2003

Antipodes archives from December 2003

Sloping Red.(About the Cover)(Brief Article)(Critical Essay)
December 1, 2003... by Neville Pilven Neville Pilven has been concerned with producing unconventional modernist landscape paintings for about four decades. His work relies on atmospheric light to define form and distance, and so belongs to the evolving...

Postmodern rituals: contemporary Australia responds to Bali.
December 1, 2003... AFTER BALI, OCTOBER 12, 2002, A RANGE OF PUBLIC rituals took place in Australia to remember those who had been killed in the bombing. In Melbourne, the most visible, and collective ritual was the laying of flowers by members of the public on...

Country Pub.(Brief Article)(Poem)
December 1, 2003... Country Pub In my time this was a six-pub town. Long gone now but The Shamrock still lives. I breathe the incense of hops and fags, move through the gregorian race-call chant and bow my head over the glass lit golden...

The buffalo: an extract from Semar's Cave: an Indonesian Journal.(Excerpt)
December 1, 2003... Out on the lake the morning breeze is wonderful. Medan's a bad dream compared with this. The boat chugs away from the hotel wharf passing the wooden fish-traps that protrude from the water like the decaying nests of birds of prey and turns to...

Emissary.(Poem)
December 1, 2003... Emissary Not counting memories pilfered, missing or embellished--X marking the spot on the birth certificate (a Midwife's hand in the miracle of life), growing up Catholic in Northern Ireland--a cast iron constitution ...

Some sources for the construction of hurtle Duffield in The Vivisector.(Critical Essay)
December 1, 2003... IN MANY RESPECTS, THE ART OF THE REALISTIC NOVELIST resembles that of the bricoleur. Almost all the materials that the writer encounters are likely to be broken down--in part at least, but not so thoroughly that their sources cannot be...

"A Failure of the imagination"? the fiction vs. nonfiction debate.(Critical Essay)
December 1, 2003... IN HIS 2003 ARTICLE "IS THE NOVEL DEAD?" MARK Mordue put forward the thesis that fiction is in trouble and literary nonfiction is taking its place. I have edited both fiction and nonfiction, am the publisher of Mark's nonfiction book,...

Our Land.(Brief Article)(Poem)
December 1, 2003... Our Land Thursday night In the Food Hall look up far enough see browning palm tree leaves, hear electric keyboard notes beneath announcements, children crying. Back in distraction there's dinner from...

Repetition and colonial variation on the Europe theme: an interview with Christopher J. Koch.(Interview)
December 1, 2003... Jean-Francois Vernay: Last time we spoke together, you said you graduated in philosophy. There's a definite existentialist streak illustrated in most of your endings. The protagonist usually regains control of his own life and shapes his own...

Unfreedoms of expression: a latter-day sermon for the dispossessed.(Critical Essay)
December 1, 2003... FOR AT LEAST ONE MOMENT IN MY ADDRESS YOU WILL feel that slithering sense of self-consciousness. Embarrassment, even. I saw a man attempting to couple with a lamp-post once, but on reflection, he was actually engaged in an assault upon that...

The Great Unsaying.(Brief Article)(Poem)
December 1, 2003... THE GREAT UNSAYING And the Lord came down to see the city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven (Genesis 11: 4) Farther off, came lightning silent and unanswering, the tower that emerged from between the...

Jouer au Tennis.(Poem)
December 1, 2003... You get ready for tennis. He knows that. Tennis is different shoes. It's a different dress. It's a white hat with only a front on it, and green under it. He watches his mother. The sun is reaching in the bay window at...

Peter Carey's Jack Maggs and the trauma of convictism.(Critical Essay)
December 1, 2003... Australia kept on being Victorian long after the British stopped being Victorian. People arriving in Australia many years after the Victorian era well and truly ended would see its vestiges there. In the outposts of the Empire these exiled...

Aubade.(Brief Article)(Poem)
December 1, 2003... Aubade Billie lets Theo drive her car. In the suicide seat beside him she forbears when he crunches the gears backs up over the kerb u-turns across the median. On the roundabout he'll brake...

From The Golden Courtesan.(Excerpt)
December 1, 2003... This is an excerpt from the sixth chapter of Shady Cosgrove's the Golden Courtesan. Set in the 1830s, the novel responds to Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eye in a Thysian tradition by exploring the life of Edward Rochester's mistress, Celine...

Nightfall.(Brief Article)(Poem)
December 1, 2003... Nightfall First, the electric equivalence of gloom and luster. Air tingles, a half-shining dust settles on things: the unlit candle between us, the glass your fingers touch; the whole room more softly, piercingly ...

Yregami.(Brief Article)(Poem)
December 1, 2003... Yregami A warm stocking caught among limbs evokes a country road and abandoned poodles growing out on the paddocks sway like charred trunks. Sliced whitefish bony with wind and very high up recall an autumn...

On sacred sites.(Poem)
December 1, 2003... On sacred sites Mount Saddleback looks down on concrete silos--sentinels to the town. Repositories of sound and gold whose construction workers left a legacy of the war's most famous beer quota. The footy...

Michael Dransfield as landscape poet.(Critical Essay)
December 1, 2003... IT MIGHT SEEM LIKE A STRANGE, DISCONTINUOUS TRAIL to weave, to move from the poetry of Michael Dransfield to the libretto of Gotterdammerung via Western Australian literature and the city versus the bush debate. But there are some fundamental...

Pas de deux for lovers.(Brief Article)(Poem)
December 1, 2003... Pas de deux for lovers Morning ought not To be complex The sun is a seed Cast at dawn into the long Furrow of history. To wake And go Would be so simple. Yet How the first light...

Guilt.(Brief Article)(Poem)
December 1, 2003... Guilt In the garden, this pale mist: every leaf and blade of grass bearing jewels of quietness. You are still inside asleep, and everything I look on seems like something from your dream, even that...

A New Life.(Brief Article)(Poem)
December 1, 2003... A New Life After seven years of strangers renting their home, they return. She has the builders in, then electricians, plumbers, the curtain people, the carpet people-- New, I will make my house new!...

The Tree of Man as a pioneer novel.(Critical Essay)
December 1, 2003... When The Tree of Man appeared in 1955, it was hailed as the first important novel by an Australian to gain world attention. In a front-page review in the New York Times Review of Books James Stem praised it highly, and The Sydney Morning...

A conversation with M.T.C. Cronin.(Interview)
December 1, 2003... Anyone looking at your CV would I think be quite startled to find your first publications coinciding with the beginning of your legal training. Did you really embark on a writing career at the same time that you began to seriously apply...

Late Rose 2.(Brief Article)(Poem)
December 1, 2003... Late Rose 2 The Late Rose is in full bloom. Defense has passed away. Argument has been recast as a ringing bell. The you I am with today has already canceled out the you I was with yesterday. There are new...

Manmade modernism: mythical space in Australian painting, 1940-1970.(Critical Essay)
December 1, 2003... THE RECEIVED STORY OF AUSTRALIAN ART, WHETHER it appears in the general histories of Bernard Smith (1962), and Robert Hughes (1966), or in more specialised studies like Richard Haese's Rebels and Precursors (1981) tells us of a change brought...

Soundings from down under.(Editorial)
December 1, 2003... Jalapenos Tinged With Gold Black Pepper is a small press that specializes in high-quality poetry both in terms of the prestige and talent of the writers and the production quality of the books. One of their latest releases is Adrienne...

Patrick White Award.(2003 Literary Awards)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Janette Turner Hospital has won the 2003 Patrick White Prize for a writer whose work had "not received adequate recognition" in Australia. Janette Turner Hospital is author of seven internationally acclaimed novels and several short story...

Vogel Award.(2003 Literary Awards)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... The 2003 Vogel Award, which entails publication of a first book by Allen & Unwin, was jointly given to Ruth Balint, for Troubled Waters, and Nicholas Angel, for Drown Them in the Sea. Balint's book is an ambitious mixture of cultural theory,...

The Victorian Premier's Literary Awards.(2003 Literary Awards)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction Brian Castro has won the Victorian Premier's Vance Palmer Prize for Fiction with Shanghai Dancing (Giramondo). Castro has won the prize on two previous occasions, in 1992 with Double-wolf, and again in 1993...

The Man Booker Prize.(2003 Literary Awards)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Australian-born first-time novelist D.B.C. Pierre was awarded the Man Booker Prize for Vernon God Little (Faber & Faber). The novel is a satirical tale of contemporary America and "has been described as like Flannery O'Connor on an overdose...

National Book Award for Fiction.(2003 Literary Awards)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2003... Shirley Hazzard, who was born in Australia and now lives in New York, won the 2003 (US) National Book Award for Fiction for her novel The Great Fire.

Qualified successes.(Forcibly Removed)(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... Albert Holt. Forcibly Removed. Magabala Books: Broome, WA, 2001. 192pp. $18.65. Paperback. ISBN 1-875641-64-5 Albert Holt's Forcibly Removed is a valuable testament to the oppression of Aboriginal peoples. It also serves as an indictment...

The Production of Australian Literature.(The Making of the Australian Literary Imagination)(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... Richard Nile. The Making of the Australian Literary Imagination. St. Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2002. 315 pp. A$28.00. Paper. ISBN 0-7022-3165-7 In his introduction, Nile identifies his thesis as "the claim that the twentieth century was...

Alchemy underlies Patrick White's Quest for Individuation.(Patrick White and Alchemy)(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... James Bulman-May. Patrick White and Alchemy. Melbourne: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2001. 332 pp. A$29.95. ISBN: 1-74097-002-0 In Patrick White and Alchemy, James Bulman-May examines White's personal mythology and its relationship to...

Christina Stead's Sense of Place.(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... Ann Blake. Christina Stead's Politics of Place. Nedlands: U of Western Australia P, 1999. ISBN: 1876268352 The title of this book-length study evokes ambiguous connotations since the word "politics" may allude to the ideological...

Our Last Best Chance?(Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society)(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... Ghassan Hage. Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society. Merlin Press: London, 2003. ISBN 0850365333 It was with some hesitation that I began reading Hage's Against Paranoid Nationalism, for I was unfamiliar...

Images of Australian Citizenship in the 1950s.(Imagining the Fifties: Private Sentiment and Political Culture in Menzies' Australia)(Book Review)
December 1, 2003... John Murphy. Imagining the Fifties: Private Sentiment and Political Culture in Menzies' Australia. Sydney: U of New South Wales P, 2000. 264 pp. ISBN: 0 86840 690 2 John Murphy's Imagining the Fifties offers an engaging look at postwar...

In memoriam.(Clement Byrne Christesen)(Obituary)
December 1, 2003... Clement Byrne Christesen (1911-2003) C. B. Christesen, founding editor of Meanjin, died last June, just two years after the death of his beloved wife Nina, who was the inspiration for some of his most beautiful poetry. Clem wrote...