Road Closed
Road closed / Water over bridge / The turgid brown Hunter washes more valley away / This full rain has most times drenched this thin red earth in March
Children's Book Awards in Australia: Their Effects on the Literary Marketplace
This study explores the outcomes resulting from the formal recognition of selected children's literature in Australia for six stakeholder cohorts. For the purposes of this research, the recognition was in the form of a children's or young adult literary award. The process leading to an award is documented in policies, reports and handbooks and some publicity is evident in the media, journals, online sources and popular literary magazines. However, the outcomes of this personal, corporate, organizational, social, cultural and economic activity have not been examined to date and this research project addresses the question of exactly what happens to the selected stakeholders after the winning announcement is made. Out of the general focus question there arose subsidiary questions relating to the strength of the impacts, the longevity of the impacts, the current knowledge of a range of awards and responses in terms of income or impressions of award related promotional activity. Selecting meaningful and relevant populations to survey and to clarify relevance and vocabulary in questioning involved a pilot study and resulted in a survey structure of six cohorts to represent the affected field. The survey method involved mailed questionnaires. In the construction of the questionnaires it was apparent that cohort-specific questionnaires would be necessary for there were very few avenues of questioning which were common across all cohorts. As these questionnaires were developed the research design evolved into six mini-projects which had some elements in common but also unique features and perspectives. The evolution of book awards over time is explored in this work. Recognition and dedicated publishing of Australian children's literature slowly developed out of children's literature published in Great Britain, the mother country. This thesis briefly follows this growth and development of literary works for children and the awarding of prizes for exceptional quality, revealing the shifts in perception of the nature of the child reader and society's perception of what constitutes a quality child's book in Australia. Book awards for children's literature did not arise spontaneously but were an expression of interest, respect and maturity in the development of Australian literature.
Gay Liberation
In February 1973, I set out to find Gay Liberation - not the philosophy, which was vaguely coalescing inside my head, the organisation. I'd heard about Gay Liberation because of its recent demonstrations and the resulting hullabaloo in the press. It was a demonstrable part of the light of change beginning to shine across Australia since the election of Gough Whitlam just two months before in December 1972. Gay Liberation had broken away from the more conservative CAMP (Campaign Against Moral Persecution), which focused on law reform, to advocate more radical public activism. CAMP itself was founded only in 1970. Gay Liberation as a movement was born in New York out of the Stonewall riots in Greenwich Village in 1969. These incidents were the first time homosexuals fought back against police harassment and discrimination. As a result, Gay Liberation espoused a radical philosophy more in line with the spirit of the times. This didn't make it more acceptable, just more visible. The people in CAMP understood the need to work behind the scenes as well in order to effect meaningful change. This was something I would not appreciate for many years, but I was young and silly, and momentous and meaningful change seemed realisable in that brittle, bright light of the first year of Whitlam.
Slip, slop, slap: rethinking, re-writing and re-viewing Australia
The well-known mantra 'slip on a T-shirt, slop on some sunscreen and slap on a hat' articulates the Australian Cancer Council's mission to promote an awareness of the need to ensure protection against the harmful effects of the Australian sun. Of the three actions evoked in the above slogan, the one on which we will focus in this paper is 'the slap'. Christos Tsiolkas' novel 'The slap' (2008) builds on and breaks from a wide range of narratives about Australia, its people and preoccupations. These same elements of Australian culture are currently being explored in the adaptation of that novel - an eight-part drama series screened on ABC television which, like the novel before it, has elicited a variety of audience responses, expressed in a range of cultural forms and forums. In this paper, which constitutes a preliminary discussion of what is envisaged as a more extensive research project and research-informed teaching exercise, we focus on a short segment from the novel and a sequence from the television series to illustrate what rethinking, re-writing and re-viewing of Australia they provoke. In addition, we outline our notion of designing a new (replacement) English, Communication and Media (ECM) unit of study based entirely on and around 'The slap' - as prose and film narratives - and their cultural precursors and repercussions.
The Writing and Publishing of Australia's First Gay Novel
The Australian writer Gerald Marcus Glaskin was quite a handsome fellow, though his naval record - complexion sallow, hair black, eyes brown; height five feet ten inches; scar on his forehead - suggests otherwise. His good looks were combined with a sharp mind and a quick wit, overall a combination that served him well for much of his life. While Glaskin's reputation as a writer has faded, his legacy should not be forgotten. His writing was powerful and found an appreciative audience in the 1950s and 1960s. One book in particular deserves revisiting and it holds an iconic place in Australia literature. No End to the Way, published by Barrie & Rockliff of London in 1965 under the pseudonym Neville Jackson, is the first overtly gay Australian novel (Hurley 190). The book had a powerful impact on a generation of young Australian men coming to terms with their homosexuality, as demonstrated by the audience responses to a version of this paper delivered to the Australian Homosexual Histories conference at the University of Melbourne in November 2013.
Sex, sleaze and righteous anger: the rise and fall of gay magazines and newspapers in Australia
For much of the 20th century, homosexuality was illegal in Australia. The country was also subject to draconian censorship; overt homosexual works were banned. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, however, social change was afoot and publications of the homosexual rights and gay liberation movements began to appear, soon joined by more commercial publications aligned to an increasingly overt gay sub-culture. These publications prospered over the next three decades. Their focus ranged from earnest proselytising to post-modern pornography. Most maintained strong links to their readerships, even though many of them were distributed free of charge and relied on advertising to survive. This paper chronicles the range of these publications and examines how they helped develop and foster a gay, lesbian or queer readership (and hence outside the mainstream); explores how and why the printed forms of these publications gradually merged within the mainstream as same-sex relationships lost their deviance; and notes that these publications have largely been replaced by digital alternatives in the 21st century.
When You is Me: Sustained Second-person Narrative Voice in the Works of G.M. Glaskin and Peter Kocan
It is almost universally agreed that sustained second-person narration in fiction is hard to manage, and that second-person narrative voice is very rarely used because of this difficulty. Whether or not this is true, the employment of sustained second person narrative form in literary fiction in English has not been as prevalent as the corresponding first-person and third-person forms. One difficulty is that it directly addresses the reader, making the reader complicit with the narrative voice. But this can be used to very good effect, setting up a collaboration of reader and writer where 'you' becomes 'me'. This paper explores the use of sustained second-person narrative in G. M. Glaskin's No End to the Way and Peter Kocan's The Treatment.
A Professional Author-How G.M. Glaskin Earned a Living
Western Australian author Gerald Marcus Glaskin (GMG; 16 December 1923-11 March 2000) wrote from life, using his experiences to continually expand his creative repertoire. In one sense, this was to be his downfall, as his life was unconventional for his time. Because he mined own experiences so much in his creative writing, his works eventually moved out of mainstream markets. However, this paper focuses on his financial success as a writer, details of which can be documented through study of the meticulous records kept by both GMG and his publisher, Barrie & Rockliff of London. Other scholarly analysis of the income received by authors is limited. Katherine Bode (2012) does not deal with the subject in her otherwise comprehensive quantitative analysis of Australian publishing. What little is known about the income of professional authors from this or other periods, and whether they were able to survive on the proceeds of their writing, is incidental to other research.
Hans-Ulrich Treichel: Lost
Hans-Ulrich Treichel is professor of German literature at the University of Leipzig. He has written five volumes of poetry and his flair for words is strikingly apparent in his writing. The ironic narrative voice of Lost, his first novel, that of a young boy, provides a darkly comic edge to a story emanating from the displacement of a family in Germany following the end of the Second World War. At first the young narrator believes his older brother starved to death when his parents fled the invading Russians in their flight from Prussia to Westphalia. But when he is old enough, his mother informs him she gave his brother away to another refugee when she thought she and her husband were about to be shot by the Russians. "I didn't have a dead brother. I had a lost one. That was hardly a plus for me," the narrator notes. His mother laments that she didn't even have time to tell the peasant woman to whom she entrusted her son his name, Arnold. The narrator suggests that maybe their baby boy was lucky and they named him Arnold again.
How to tell your father to drop dead: ... and other stories
A collection of short stories that engage with topics in contemporary Australian culture, on topics ranging from family dynamics to gay culture.