Transformations : landscape in recent Australian fiction / Gillian Mary Tyas

Focusing on novels written since 1980 by Australian authors Rodney Hall, Liam Davison, Tim Winton, Elizabeth Jolley and Gerald Murnane, and engaging with responses to the land by visual and performing artists, this thesis explores the idea that the writer and artist are mediators in the multitude of experiences that constitutes landscape.

Uncanny suburbia and Australian fiction

 The thesis consisted of both short stories and analysis of Patrick White, Peter Carey and Helen Hodgman. Researching how everyday life can be rendered unhomely and unsettling; and focusing on the representation of women, particularly mothers, resulted in new insights into Australia’s literary relationship with suburbia.

New world orders and the dystopian turn : transforming visions of territoriality and belonging in recent Australian children's fiction

Through the 1990s and into the new millennium, Australian children's literature responded to a conservative turn epitomised by the Howard government and to new world order imperatives of democracy, the market economy, globalisation, and the IT revolution. These responses are evidenced in the ways that children's fiction speaks to the problematics of representation and cultural identity and to possible outcomes of devastating historical and recent catastrophes. Consequently, Australian children's fiction in recent years has been marked by a dystopian turn. Through an examination of a selection of Australian children's fiction published between 1995 and 2003, this paper interrogates the ways in which hope and warning are reworked in narratives that address notions of memory and forgetting, place and belonging. We argue that these tales serve cautionary purposes, opening the way for social critique, and that they incorporate utopian traces of a transformed vision for a future Australia. The focus texts for this discussion are: Secrets of Walden Rising (Allan Baillie, 1996), Red Heart (Victor Kelleher, 2001), Deucalian (Brian Caswell, 1995), and Boys of Blood and BOlle (David Metzenthen, 2003).

Babylonia : reconfiguring the Australian political novel in the 'postfeminist', 'postmodern', 'postcolonial' era

The thesis comprises the comic novel "Babylonia", set in the Northern Territory, the Middle East and the United States in August 1990 after the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and the accompanying exegesis that links "Babylonia" to selected Australian fiction and to political and cultural concerns of the current era.

Eleven seasons : a creative writing journey through modern Australian football

This thesis offers a novel, 'Eleven seasons', that traces the physical and emotional journey of a young male footballer through the mid-1980s and mid-1990s. It also offers a comparative review of creative writing about Australian football, and a critical analysis of the book's creative gestation from idea to completed text.

Fiction in oils

Comprises a collection of seventeen stories based on Australian women's paintings and a critical exegesis that together represent a creative and theoretical response to the ways in which short fiction writing can be informed by visual art.

Creative and literary responses to Australian middle-class experiences of financial upheaval

This thesis—comprising a novel, The Company He Keeps, and exegesis—explores the near absence of literary fiction written about the Australian Middle Class and their responses to financial stress (1980 – 2008), finding that the language of global economic reform has triumphed over political discourse and, in particular, silenced women.

Editorial

This issue of Papers presents four essays canvassing a diverse range of theoretical and textual interests. Beverley Pennell’s ‘Ozzie Kids Flee the Garden of Delight: Reconfigurations of Childhood in Australian Children’s Fictions’ tracks shifts in how childhood is conceptualised in contemporary Australian fiction for children, using as focus texts Joanne Horniman’s Sand Monkeys and Odo Hirsch’s trilogy of ‘Hazel Green’ books. This essay argues that cultural discourses around children and childhood have shifted from an emphasis on adulthood and childhood as distinct and separate domains of experience, and from the idealisation of childhood as it manifested in Romantic textuality, to a blurring of boundaries between children and adults. In Australian texts, Pennell sees this shift as incorporating an increasing democratisation of power relations between adults and children, and an appreciation of the diversity of child populations. This essay invites comparative studies which explore the extent to which representations of childhood in Australian texts are similar to those evident in other national literatures for children.