Australian Literature/Cultural Studies
Book Details

Departures

How Australia Reinvents Itself

Xavier Pons (ed.)

Departures of every kind have shaped Australian culture. This stimulating and energetic collection of essays investigates how Australia reinvents itself.

Opinion

"The diversity (of essays in the book) suggests a reason for departures as the hold-all phrase: the unfettered, fresh questioning, from a surprising range of points-of-view, of Australia and its reinventions of itself. . . All praise to Melbourne University Press for publishing the book. . ." (Peter Pierce, Canberra Times, 1/6/02)

"These contributions are genuinely, properly disturbing; they invite European students, and indeed others, into the Australias behind the facades." (Sylvia Lawson, Australian Book Review, August 2002)

About this Title

Departures of every kind have shaped Australian culture. Most obvious are the momentous departures of emigrants seeking new lives in a new land. But this evocative book proposes that the idea of departure spans much more than travel and migration.

Tales of departure are often narratives of progress. They tell of groping towards something new, towards regeneration or reinvention. It may be Aboriginal people using poetry to forge pathways through trauma--or immigrant theatre bursting upon mainstream consciousness with Wogs Out of Work.

This stimulating and energetic collection of essays investigates how Australia reinvents itself. Contributions run the full gamut--from poetry, drama and film to social and political debate. Artists seek fresh forms; engineers plan better roads; marginalised voices shout to be heard. Transgression, whether political, sexual, cultural or social, often walks hand in hand with innovation. And death is the final departure.

Departures offers contemporary writing of a high order, from both Australia and Europe. For Australians keen to discover how their culture has reshaped and renewed itself, this book charts a vivid cultural map.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Contributors

Introduction (Xavier Pons)

Starting Points
1 Pilbara Beginnings (George Seddon)
2 Desert Departures: Isolation, Innovation and Introversion in Ice-age Australia (Keith McConnochie)

Travelling
3 Departures to the Promised Land: Kylie Tennant's The Battlers and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (Robert L. Ross)
4 The Pacific Highway and Australian Modernity (Nancy Cushing)
5 The Northern Territory's Past: Public History, Public Memory and Cultural Heritage Tourism (David Carment)

Migrations
6 From 'Hello Freedom' to 'Fuck You Australia': Recent Chinese-Australian Writing (Wenche Ommundsen)
7 Immigrant Voices in Recent Australian Theatre (Donald Pulford)

Identities
8 No More 'National Identity': Ethnicity and Alternative Sexual Orientation in Australian Movies of the 1990s (Adi Wimmer)
9 The Rise and Fall of Statehood for the Northern Territory (Alistair Heatley)
10 Vitalist Nationalism, the White Aborigine and Evolving National Identity (Karen Barker)
11 Australian Film: Policy, Text and Criticism (Franz Kuna and Petra Strohmaier)

Passing Away
12 'To Fresh Woods and Pastures New'?: Modern Australian Elegy and Literary Tradition (Werner Senn)
13 'The Grasshopper Memory Leaps': Bruce Dawe's Elegies (Dennis Haskell)
14 Writing of Death and Death of Writing in Brian Castro's Stepper (Bernadette Brennan)
15 The Departure of the Author: Gerald Murnane's Landscape with Landscape (Karin Hansson)

Transgressions
16 Brave Red Witches: Communist Women Playwrights and the Sydney New Theatre (Susan Pfisterer)
17 Departing from Their Sphere? Australian Women in Science, 1880-1960 (Jane Carey)
18 Deviation and Devotion: Francis Webb's 'Homosexual' (Noel Rowe)
19 Guerrillas, Poseurs and Nomads: The Politics of the Avant-Garde in Art and Music (Chris McAuliffe)
20 Moral Departures: Australian Church Women and the Mass Media, 1908-1930 (Ellen Warne)
21 The Westering of Quasimodo: The Legacy of the Grotesque in the New World (Michael Ackland)

Innovating
22 Becoming 'Absolutely Modern': Adamson and Tranter's Abandonment (Michael Brennan)
23 Catherine Helen Spence: Enlightenment Woman (Helen Thompson)
24 Ec-centric Places: Departures in Australian Property Law (Nicole Graham)
25 Globalism and Its Discontents (Paul Gillen)

By Way of Conclusion
26 Bare Feet, Broken Glass: Aboriginal Poetry and the Leaving of Trauma (Dennis McDermott)

Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

About the Author

Xavier Pons is Professor of English at the University of Toulouse-Le Mirail and has been a visiting professor and research fellow at several Australian universities.

978-0-522-84995-0