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In this paper the focus is on the possibilities that poetry and prose offer as pedagogical tools that can both accommodate and address difficult and painful knowledges. The paper presents and analyses poems and prose written by students at a non-traditional secondary school for disadvantaged girls (many of whom identify as Indigenous Australian). Through stories of grief and pain, but also hope and possibility, the poetry/prose book signifies a sense of collective political agency against oppressive relations towards the girls creating new moulds of existence. Contra to dominant approaches to recognising and valuing Indigeneity in schools, these writings represent Indigenous culture as a complex, dynamic and contingent social practice. While it is contended that a valuing of marginalised cultures is an important aspect of cultural recognition, the paper argues that a broader and more critical focus is required in beginning to address Indigenous oppressions. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Australia, with its history and peculiar and fragile ecosystem, offers a model case on how globalisation has been affecting local environments. Unlike the United States, the nation has never been fully comfortable with its relation to natural elements, at least since the first European settlement in the late 18th century. Australian literature has reflected such uneasiness and produced writers like Henry Lawson, Patrick White, and A.D. Hope, who all depict the nature of the southern continent as grotesque and hostile to their sensibilities. In recent years, as Aboriginal culture has gained popularity and global environmentalism has taken root, Australia, in its official self-presentation, seems to have overcome the issue, attracting tourists to the abundant environmental experiences it claims to offer. However, reading contemporary Australian poetry shows otherwise as uneasiness is still strongly felt in the Australian psyche. Whether dealing with the suburban landscape or so-called pristine nature, poets tend to confess how Australian environments and contemporary ways of life disrupt each other. My paper focuses on a recent anthology of Australian poetry, Active Aesthetics: Contemporary Australian Poetry (2016), and analyses this uneasiness as it surfaces in several works, arguing that it appropriately reflects the inevitable impacts of globalisation on the Australian ecosystem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the Hmong funeral ceremony, detailed instructions for the journey to the world of the ancestors are sung and played to the soul of the deceased. The free-reed mouth organ, or qeej, encrypts lengthy sung poems in its seven musical notes, creating a disguised language that can only be understood by the dead. This paper presents a first and complete version of the funeral poems of the qeej player from Los who resettled in Australia in 1991. The text is presented in White Hmong with english translation. An introduction and annotations to the translations describe the qeej's role in the funeral, compare accounts of the Hmong funeral from different times and places; and situate the language, imagery, and metaphor used in the text within the Hmong worldviews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Displacement following the Iranian Revolution in 1979, and later political instability in the Middle East, has led to the increase of Iranian migrants to Australia and beyond, many of whom live in exile and can never return. This article explores how Iranian conceptualisations of the sea provide a framework for entanglements with nature and the environment that are poetic and turbulent, and provides insights into nostalgia and belonging. It explores some entanglements with the ‘sea’ in the work of classical and contemporary Persian poets, diasporic Iranian women’s literature, artwork and memories of newcomers of Iranian heritage who seek asylum in Australia. The article also highlights the connections between poet and world through investigating the role of the geographical realm and nostalgia in producing the worlds of human relations and thoughts with the place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AustLit is a major Australian cultural heritage database and the most comprehensive record of a nation's literary history in the world. In this article we will present the successful results of a project addressing the challenge of discovering and recording creative writing published in digitized historical Australian newspapers, provided by the National Library of Australia's Trove service. As a first step in identifying creative writing, we developed an automated method for identifying articles that are likely to be poems by searching for a number of signals embedded in articles. When this work began, AustLit contained more than 10,200 bibliographical records for poems published between 1803 and 1954 (75% prior to 1900) with links to the full text in 115 different newspapers. The aim of the project was to expand this number of bibliographical records in AustLit and provide a foundation for analysing the importance of poetry in newspaper publishing of the period. Taking advantage of Ted Underwood's (Getting Everything you Want from HathiTrust http://tedunderwood.com/ 2012/07/27/getting-everything-you-want-from-hathitrust/, and Open Data (http://tedunderwood.com/open-data/): The Stone and the Shell, Underwood blog posts (Both accessed 27 October 2015), 2012) work with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century full text in the HathiTrust collection, we trained a naive Bayesian classifier, modifying code from Daniel Shiffman (Bayesian Filtering. http://shiffman.net/teaching/a2z_2008/bayesian/ (accessed 27 October 2015), 2008) and Paul Graham (A Plan for Spam. http://www.paulgraham.com/spam. html (accessed 27 October 2015), 2002) and improving the quality of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) by using the overProof correction algorithm. We have been able to successfully identify large numbers of poems in the newspapers database, greatly expanding AustLit's coverage of this important literary form. After suitable training of the classifier, we were able to successfully identify 88% of the newspaper articles that a knowledgeable human would classify as 'poetry'. Our results have encouraged us to consider enhancing and extending the techniques to aid the identification of other forms of literature and criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Poetic inquiry is a contentious area of qualitative research. In this article, we discuss some of the issues plaguing this field of inquiry. We then analyse a collection of poems about hope written by a sample of young people from Tasmania, Australia. The poems were written as part of the 2011 Tree of Hope project, which utilised multiple, arts-based methods to provide insights into what young people hope for in the future and the role of hope in their lives. Participants utilised one of three poetic structures. While each structure produced distinct themes, a connection between "hope and happiness" overlapped the two structured types of poetry-the acrostic and sense poetry. However, when writing free verse poetry, the expression of additional dimensions of hope, including the flipside of both having hope and losing hope was evident. We conclude that hope is particularly important to young people and that inviting participant-voiced poetry is an effective technique for investigating conceptual topics such as young people and hope. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reports on a participant-centred research project with English teachers in a senior secondary college in Melbourne, Australia. It builds on previous research (Weaven and Clark 2009, 2011), which showed a low take-up of the opportunities to teach poetry in Victoria's senior secondary English curriculum. This study explores the reasons why teachers of English are unwilling to use poetry texts in their senior classes. The teachers who participated in this study discussed and documented their attitudes towards the teaching of poetry and explored with each other the pedagogical challenges associated with teaching poetry. Their discussions - an analysis of which forms the empirical core of this article - reveal a range of explanations for teachers' reservations about offering poetry to their students. Importantly, these teachers were able to use professional discussion as a means to consider what changes in teaching practice could be successfully developed to facilitate more time spent on the teaching of poetry in senior secondary classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers news briefs on various issues. The Australian Cricketers' Association and Cricket Australia (CA) are considering 12-month trial of hair testing of players. Canadian provinces are likely to remove OxyContin and OxyNEO from the publicly funded drugs list. FIFA has insisted Brazil government to give the right to sell beer at the Brazil World Cup which is going to be held in 2014. Otto Perez, the Guatemala's new President has joined together with Latin American presidents over the issue of legalizing drugs.

The article offers information on various events and activities held and attended by the International Byron Societies in 2010-2011. It states that professional actors Alison Skilbeck and Edward MacLiam have read excerpts from poems by Lord George Gordon Byron at The Naval Club in February 2010. It says that the Australian Byron Society held the traditional Lord Byron's Birthday Lunch at the Athenian Greek restaurant in Australia.

The article provides an overview of livres composés, which is a response to the challenge of the long poem that developed in the mid-to late-nineteenth century. It mentions that it proves the importance in the development of a new influence of French poetry to Australian poetry through the work of Christopher Brennan, a poet and a professor. It also enumerates the work of Brennan through the development of livres composés, which include "XXI Poems," "The Burden of Tyre" and "A Chant of Doom."

The article discusses and critical reception of the poetry of American poet Emily Dickinson in Australia is presented. Topics include edition of Dickinson's Poems held by the University of Sydney Library and others; addition of Dickinson's work in the high school syllabus in Australia; and the publication of James Reeves' "Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson". It also discusses creative reception of Dickinson by Australian musicians including Nigel Butterley.

This article focuses on the rise of women's poetry in the 1970s in New South Wales. The author traces the complex relationship between women's poetry and the radical small press scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s. She traces how poets of both sexes were discussing revolution in terms of authorship and publishing. This will then give light on how gender was taken up and used within this discourse of transformation.

Points out to a crisis in fiction brought on by the short-term goals of the publishing business in Australia. Observation that the publishing timetables and lack of in-house editing skills have resulted in the loss of quality of Australian fiction; Bibliographies; Poetry; Drama; Fiction; Letters and autobiography; Anthologies; Criticism; Non-fiction; New journals.

An interview with contemporary bilingual poet and Padma Shri recipient Jayanta Mahapatra is presented. Topics discussed by Mahapatra include his visit to the University of Iowa in Iowa City in 1976, experiences at the Adelaide Festival of Arts in Australia in 1978, and the important reviewers of his poems and books in the early part of his career as a poet. He also mentions about good poem, poetry travel, and Odia writing.