Australian Literary Studies articles from January 1998

Australian Literary Studies archives from January 1998

Introduction: Subtopia, or the Problem of Suburbia.
January 1, 1998... SUBURBIA has been a neuralgic point in debates about Australian culture and Australian identity since the end of the nineteenth century. Louis Esson's 1911 diatribe against the `vaunted purity of the suburban home' captured what is still a...

The Pursuit of Oblivion: in Flight From Suburbia.
January 1, 1998... This essay is an exploration of the suburban imaginary in David Ireland's The Glass Canoe (1976), Bruce Dawe's Condolences of the Season (1971) and Christos Tsiolkas' Loaded (1995). While the foregrounded concern of these works has as much to...

James McAuley's New Guinea: Colonialism, Modernity, Suburbia.
January 1, 1998... Morphett: Australian intellectuals seem to me to have this quality of being almost self-fabricated out of what is generally a suburban background. What was your background? McAuley: Suburban, Sydney. I was brought up in...

Shopping At Last!: History, Fiction and the Anti-Suburban Tradition.
January 1, 1998... The well-known line of anti-suburban criticism that we associate with the Barry Humphries of the 1950s actually had its beginnings as a manifesto of the late-nineteenth-century international bohemianism that gained momentum in Australia from...

Decomposing Suburbia: Patrick White's Perversity.
January 1, 1998... Suburbia, whatever else it may be, is also a euphemism for normality. As such it has become central to representations of transgression, deviance or perversion that are either implicitly or explicitly anti-suburban in their refusal of a...

Subdivisions of Suburbia: the Politics of Place in Melissa Lucashenko's 'Steam Pigs' and Amanda Lohrey's 'Camille's Bread.'.
January 1, 1998... A whole history remains to be written of spaces -- which would at the same time be the history of powers (both of those terms in the plural) -- from the great strategies of geopolitics to the little tactics of the habitat. (Foucault, `The Eye...

Shit Creek: Suburbia, Abjection and Subjectivity in Australian `Grunge' Fiction.
January 1, 1998... `Where's Shit creek?' asked Danny. Seemed like it was in every suburb of Melbourne we laid our fingertips on. The muddy brown waters would start swirling almost the same minute we opened the front door. `Don't worry, you'll never go...

Neither Here Nor There: Suburban Voices in Australian Poetry.
January 1, 1998... In a 1996 interview Chris Wallace-Crabbe observed: `There was a stage when those of us who wrote about the scorned suburbs were looked down on by scions of the squattocratic gentry, like Judith Wright and Geoff Dutton. Subconsciously, they...

The Suburban Problem of Evil.
January 1, 1998... Our first scene is a Western Sydney suburban lounge-room seventeen years ago. It is very clean and tidy and full of shelves and little tables with small pastel ornaments on them. They are the figurines of angels and babies and little girls on...

How to Use a Street Directory: Detail and Knowledge in the Work of Alan Wearne.
January 1, 1998... How is it that we can find our way around a city if we think that every street, every suburb, looks the same? The devil, here as elsewhere, is in the detail. Poetry, among its many mansions, includes modes which can be most sensitive to detail...

INTERVIEW.
January 1, 1998... MD: From the outside you must look a most unusual poet. You begin in 1972 with Public Relations, a small book with small poems, then New Devil, New Parish in 1976 which is dominated by a fifty-five page verse novella called `Out Here'. Ten...