(Un)belonging in Australia : poetry and nation

What kind of appetite does poetry have for creating new discourses about the nation? This essay will ask if poetry can re-imagine and rewrite what are often oppressive and exclusionary national discourses, asking how – historically and in contemporary work – poetry has been concerned with national forms of belonging and unbelonging. Further, the essay will ask whether Australian poetry is able to generate new and even hopeful language in which to think about the nation.

Improving the value of the national curriculum through ethics and the religious

Ethics and religion are currently being considered for inclusion into Australia's national curriculum. This paper argues that such a consideration ought to be founded upon an education for democracy, where students are encouraged to become critical inquirers. It is also contended here that an engagement with ethics and the religious has a lot of potential for enhancing the educative value of our national curriculum because currently ACARA lacks any aspirational purposes for education and is merely focused upon the technical concerns regarding teaching and learning.

Spirit-music unbound: Romanticism and print politics in Australian women's poetry 1830-1905

This thesis presents a re-mapping of Australian poetic tradition to reflect the presence of colonial women poets. The research recovers a wide range of neglected poetry, offering a new way of reading these important poets as politic and transnational, particularly through the significance of newspaper authorship and international women’s poetry.

Behind the eyes: poetry of witness

 A review of Susie Utting's poetry collection, Flame in the Fire, 2012.

Borrowings; or ways of making poetry by taking, working and returning: a study in creative practice

The collaborative poetry project ‘Borrowings’ investigates and theorises some of the processes of poetic composition. Two collaborators, by making use of incepts from each other's work, have generated new poems by exploring the nature of intertextual genesis. This paper presents key ideas generated by this activity and, in doing so, applies Deleuze's analysis of games to its consideration of the nature of poetic composition, along with his contention that ‘[t]o pass to the other side of the mirror is to pass from the relation of denotation to the relation of expression … It is to reach a region where language no longer has any relation to that which it denotes’. The project explores some of the ways in which poetry makes ‘sense’, both to the writer and reader; as well as questioning the extent to which poetry depends on its author's ‘decision’ about what to write. It also teases out some of the implications for how we understand authorship if authorial decisions may be generated by incepts of one kind or another that occur to the poet apparently randomly, or may be given to them by a line or phrase that they encounter while reading. This paper's ultimate wager, and one put to the test in the project itself, is that limitation has an expansive effect on the generation of creative work.

Ethno-religious tragedy rebuilds in Iraq

In the shadows of Syria's deadly civil war, a new tragedy is building right next door, in Iraq

“Never read anything that can at all unsettle your religious faith”: reading and writing in the monthly packet

The Monthly Packet of Evening Readings for Younger Members of the English Church (1851–99) reveals the interest that Charlotte Yonge had in promoting and supporting girls as readers and writers. As the editor and as a major contributor, Yonge provided a variety of material for the magazine as part of a strategy for the development of girls' reading and writing habits in ways that were consistent with their High Anglican beliefs and that would never cause them to question their faith.