Antipodes articles from December 2008

Antipodes archives from December 2008

"Opportunistic transpositions and Elisions": Roger McDonald's The Ballad of Desmond Kale; or, the fiction question: who owns stories?(Critical essay)
December 1, 2008... THE "MAKING A FICTION OF HISTORY" PANEL AT THE 2007 Sydney Writers Festival included award-winning novelist, Roger McDonald, and renowned historian and public intellectual, Inga Clendinnen. Given Clendinnen's well-publicized attack on the...

Swank.(Poem)
December 1, 2008... Swank (for J & J) The City Cat's a vaporetto; the river is a grand canal. We zig politely, wharf to wharf, past mansions just a tad banal although they smile there well enough, contented on their...

If I Stop.(Poem)
December 1, 2008... If I Stop When the unknown feeling from the hinterland came on the wings of pop, I would shut my eyes, let the tingling spread over my scalp, and hope that this time it would last long enough to turn life inside out,...

The still point.(Short story)
December 1, 2008... Some scenes sizzle themselves into your brain without the benefit of a camera. The doctor is looking at me carefully. There are pale rings around her irises. Look in the eyes, you can always tell, said my sister, Gemma. Iris rings...

Colombo: Day Leave.(Poem)
December 1, 2008... Colombo: Day Leave His pockets bulged. The city crowded round--the fat bats squawking over the dusty racecourse, the kassipu brewers, the hawkers spitting betel tubercular in gutters. The...

Literature and the intimate space of death.(Critical essay)
December 1, 2008... THE DESIRE TO COME TO TERMS WITH DEATH, ONE'S OWN OR an other's death, is profoundly human. In our quest to understand our mortality, a quest that must by necessity fail, we turn often to literature, art, and music, and are confronted...

Woolshed Falls.(Poem)
December 1, 2008... Woolshed Falls Matilda calls: the Ute's back! Let's go out to the falls to pray. We park above the falls and, silent in assent, take separate paths. I sit among the scrub, setting on dampened ground my open ...

The man whose wife has told him to leave.(Poem)
December 1, 2008... The man whose wife has told him to leave is camping with his daughters, two fifteen year olds running feral through the trees and tents of a folk music festival. His wife has told him he should go camping, ...

The extraordinary in the ordinary: Kate Llewellyn's self-portrait of a Lemon.(Critical essay)
December 1, 2008... Bitter breast of the earth I've picked this one from a dark green laden tree this is a cold hard obdurate fruit yet one swift act releases the juice enhancing oysters fish and almost everything...

Canadian Creek.(Poem)
December 1, 2008... Canadian Creek If someone had described a creek as looking like a snake, I would have said that is way over the top, poetic license without license metaphor gone mad, until yesterday. I was striding beside the...

Sacred violence in the Chamberlain case.(Lindy Chamberlain)(Essay)
December 1, 2008... THE SCAPEGOAT In the early 1980s, many Australians demanded their say about "Lindy Chamberlain." On radio, in letters to the media, over coffee and on television, we exposed our wisdoms about mothering, matricide, inappropriate family...

In Defense of Hawaiian Shirts.(Poem)
December 1, 2008... In Defense of Hawaiian Shirts Too many uniforms mean a country's turning dangerous, that's what I thought as I watched Triumph of the Will*-- masses of Germans marching (in step) kitted out in matching threads and shod...

"No last word": postcolonial witnessing in Jackson's Track and Jackson's Track Revisited.(Critical essay)
December 1, 2008... WRITING ABOUT THE FOLLOWING TWO MEMOIRS JACKSON'S Track (1999) and Jackson's Track Revisited (2005), I am reminded of a conversation that I had with a friend about my research project on the white fathers of Aboriginal children in the...

White settler/big city: mimicry and the Metropolis in Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab.(Critical essay)
December 1, 2008... I IN THE LATE EIGHTEENTH AND EARLY NINETEENTH CENTURIES, IN such works as Robert Southey's Botany Bay Eclogues, the young Australian colonies were imagined simultaneously as barren wastelands, utopias of social renewal, and exotic byways...

Abandoned Car.(Poem)
December 1, 2008... Abandoned Car This is its last garage an old FB Holden painted in the latest colors of earth and stone to which on the downward track of mallee scrub it is slipping into an atrophy of...

Managing the Mountain.(Poem)
December 1, 2008... Managing the Mountain There are many different kinds of maps: sketch, contour, cadastral, photogrammetric, and then there are those of the heart, impossible to draw with pen and ink, navigable only by love and...

A man and his dog.(Poem)
December 1, 2008... A man and his dog When he told the blokes at the pub he was moving his family--lock, stock and dog--to the city, they clapped his back, shouted him another beer, and told him for nothing he'd be mad to take that big old...

The Crocodile Hunter's Wife.(Short story)
December 1, 2008... Their old boat is fashioned from battered aluminum and rides high in the water as if on springs. When each wave passes, the hull slaps down slightly too late like a small child trying to catch a crab. They're far out from shore now. Out...

Meeting Janet Frame.(Critical essay)
December 1, 2008... INTRODUCTIONS THE FIRST VOLUME OF YOUR AUTOBIOGRAPHIES WAS PUBLISHED in 1982. I was born in 1981, and so in the first years of my life, when I had just begun thinking, smiling, walking, and trying out--for the very first time--our shared...

a rare stillness.(Poem)
December 1, 2008... a rare stillness a rare stillness when the future gapes at you tearing away at the seams you dared sew into it [It must be electricity: all the parts of a body shake; a...

Images of Sicily and Australia in the narratives of Venero Armanno and Antonio Casella.(Critical essay)
December 1, 2008... ITALIAN AUSTRALIAN "MIGRATION" LITERATURE HAS DISPLAYED a tendency to present themes and characters closely linked to southern Italy, in particular Sicily and Calabria a phenomenon in part explained by the massive emigration from these...

Three fires.(Short story)
December 1, 2008... Night Road over the Black Spur, Vistoria--1944 Sometimes I seem to know all of Victoria. Sometimes I think I might know everything if I began to set it down and didn't waver, didn't take my attention away from it for a second. Is that...

Hoon, coon, and boong in Peter Temple's detective fiction.(Critical essay)
December 1, 2008... IN HIS RECENT, BLEAK DETECTIVE NOVEL, THE BROKEN STONE Peter Temple relies heavily on dialogue, both profane and laconic, and on the vocabulary and speech patterns of working-class and underclass Australians on the south coast. (1) In order...

The Rule.(Poem)
December 1, 2008... The Rule for Norma There are constellations more renowned, tabloid stars, famous patterns learnt in childhood as if to confirm just who we are. But our myths of origin are less remote, born out of...

Testing the limits of endurance.(Breath by Tim Winton)(Book review)
December 1, 2008... Tim Winton. Breath. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. 218 pp. US$23. ISBN-13:978-0-374-11634-7 Breath, Tim Winton's eighth adult novel, has already achieved extraordinary success, selling over 100,000 hardcover copies in...

Heroism incompatible with domestic life.(The Widow and Her Hero)(Book review)
December 1, 2008... Thomas Keneally. The Widow and Her Hero. Sydney: Vintage Books, 2007. 297 pp. n.p. ISBN 978-1-86471-102-8 Not until she's ninety years old does Grace Burden finally voice her thoughts about the circumstances surrounding the death of her...

Fading irate energy.(The Slap)(Book review)
December 1, 2008... Christos Tsiolkas. The Slap. Allen & Unwin, 2007. 496 pp. $32.95. ISBN 9781741753592 Irate energy characterizes the novels of Christos Tsiolkas. There is urgency, too: his works are populated by young people running, sweating, dancing,...

An artist's odyssey Down Under.(Eugene's Falls)(Book review)
December 1, 2008... A. Frances Johnson. Eugene's Falls. North Melbourne: Arcadia, 2007. 339 pp. n.p. ISBN 978-1-74097-169-0 A. Frances Johnson opens her beautifully penned debut novel, Eugene's Falls, with a direct invitation to us to use our "hindsight"...

An epic yet intimate opera.(The Trout Opera)(Book review)
December 1, 2008... Matthew Condon. The Trout Opera. Sydney: Vintage Books, 2007. 579pp. A$32.95. ISBN 978-1-74051-032-5. Through clear, lyrical prose, Matthew Condon's The Trout Opera questions the price of solitude, the definition of family, and the...

Poet plays with film noir verse narratives.(The Floor of Heaven)(Book review)
December 1, 2008... John Tranter. The Floor of Heaven. Sydney: Jacket P, 2007. 128 pp. n.p. ISBN 0-9756980-0-1 Over his long career, John Tranter has continually challenged himself to reinvent his poetic style and explore new directions in verse. One aspect...

Remembering life in the Torres Strait.(Life B'long Ali Drummond: A Life in the Torres Strait)(Book review)
December 1, 2008... Samantha Faulkner and Ali Drummond. Life B'long Ali Drummond: A Life in the Torres Strait. Canberra: Aboriginal Studies P, 2007.90pp. n.p. ISBN 13 978 085575 556 0 Having a written record of what historically happened to Torres Strait...

Stark lyricism tells the story of Aboriginal women in Australia.(Anonymous Premonition)(Book review)
December 1, 2008... Yvette Holt. Anonymous Premonition. St. Lucia: U of Queensland P, 2008. 88pp. n.p. ISBN 978-0-7022-3571-9 For a highly prosaic collection, it is the lyric moments that most tell the story of Yvette Holt, women, and Aboriginal...

Convict's tale of escape endures.(The Man Who Stole the Cyprus: A True Story of Escape)(Book review)
December 1, 2008... Warwick Hirst. The Man Who Stole the Cyprus: A True Story of Escape. Dural: Rosenberg, 2008. 224 pp. n.p. ISBN 978-1877058615 In 1820, having stolen ten pence worth of goods, Londoner William Walker is charged with "housebreaking" and is...

Bibliography of Australian literature and criticism published in North America-2007.(Bibliography)
December 1, 2008... The annual Antipodes bibliography attempts to provide a thorough listing of resources either published or distributed in North America during 2007 that focus on Australian literature or Australian authors. Since the bibliography concentrates...