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In the halcyon days of publishing in Australia, in the 1970s and 1980s, the University of Queensland Press (UQP) established an innovative series on the Australian Environment edited by Alan Gilpin. The series emerged from the flourishing scientific, environmental and conservation discourses. This was not the only way, or even then the central way, UQP addressed environmental issues. On the one hand, the Press actively supported the emergence of an Australian postcolonial canon in fiction and poetry through (re)publishing the works of Steele Rudd, Vance Palmer and Peter Carey. In the need to develop an international market for their books, however, fiction editors could easily and did edit out descriptions of the Australian environments. On the other hand, the Press published technical studies such as a series on Australian Ecology. With the rupture in the management of the Press in 1983, the Australian Environment series was stopped. By the 1990s with the increasing recognition of the Australian Aboriginal way of thinking about country (and the delineation of Australasian territorial copyright) UQP pulled back from developing a global market in order to establish a successful Black Australian Writers series for, primarily, a national readership. The genre of 'bush realism' and other new writing by non-Indigenous Australians that drew on environmental differences of the 'new world' in contrast to the old, as a result, shifted away from central stage in narratives of the nation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the modernist sensibility of the cultural criticism and editorial interventions of essayist and biographer Nettie Palmer. It notes Palmer's pre-war engagement with early modernism, her links with overseas modernists, and her role as a non-academic critic in interwar Australia. It also describes the selection and editing process for "An Australian Story Book," a selection of short stories anthologized by Palmer in 1928 and features Katherine Susannah Prichard's "The Cooboo."

In Australia as elsewhere within the belligerent nations of the Great War, dissenting thinkers were marginalised with the mobilisation of militarism. Vance and Nettie Palmer, Australia's most important literary partnership in the interwar period, were initially critical of the war, their response typical of the English radical intelligentsia among whom they were living at the time of its outbreak. Forced back to Australia in 1915, the Palmers had to re-establish themselves in its increasingly turbulent intellectual battlefields. Nettie's earlier anti-war beliefs and cosmopolitanism were undermined while Vance became ever more deeply enmeshed in a discourse concerning the virtues of the “ordinary people”, which encompassed the men of the Australian Imperial Force (AIF). Nevertheless, in their extensive writings about Australia, neither Palmer ever endorsed the legend of the heroic Anzacs. The Great War, however, profoundly shaped their political consciousness and their choice of genre and writing strategies, as it did others of their literary generation. This article will show that the war was a far more important influence on their work than usually acknowledged in Australian literary scholarship, and thereby reveal some of the cultural patterns that shaped their generation of Australian radical writers and intellectuals — particularly in Melbourne, arguably the heartland for the tradition of democratic literary nationalism which the Palmers have been seen to epitomise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Profiles Australian female writer Léontine Cooper. Her efforts to address the rights of white women during the suffrage movement during the late 1880s; Information on the groups comprising the women's suffrage movement; Overview of short stories she had written, including "The Boomerang".

Since the 1970s, feminist scholars have undertaken important critical work on Australian women's writing of earlier eras, profiling and promoting their fiction. Less attention has been afforded to the popular non-fiction produced by Australian women writers and, in particular, to that produced before the Second World War. Yet this writing is important for several reasons. First, the non-fiction writing of Australian women was voluminous and popular with readers. Second, this popular work critically engaged with a tumultuous political, social and moral landscape in which, as women's rights were increasingly realized through legislation, the subjectivity of women themselves was fluid and contested. Third, as many of these women were also, or principally, fiction writers, their non-fiction can be shown to have informed and influenced many of their fictional interests, themes and characters. Lastly, and critically, popular non-fiction publication helped to financially sustain many of these writers. In proposing a conceptual framework informed by the work of Pierre Bourdieu to analyse examples of this body of work, this article not only suggests that important connections exist between popular and mainstream non-fiction works – newspaper and magazine articles, essays, pamphlets and speeches – and the fictional publications of Australian women writers of the early twentieth century but also suggests that these connections may represent an Australian literary habitus where writing across genre, form and audience was a professional approach that built and sustained literary careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article compares Vance Palmer's classic novel, The Passage (1930), set in Caloundra, with Susan Johnson's The Landing (2015), a comic novel of manners set at the northern end of the contemporary Sunshine Coast. It considers the novels' different perspectives on Australian society and changing values, including attitudes to nature, arguing that Palmer's novel now seems more idealistic than realist while Johnson's cynicism about Australian life shows some disturbing elements beneath the comedy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Eleanor Dark's last published novel, Lantana Lane (published 1959), is not usually included in accounts of Australian modernism. The novel's strong criticisms of modernity, its regional focus and the Cold War context complicate its inclusion as a modernist text. However, revised understandings of modernism generated in the past few decades of scholarship allow for a reinvestigation of Dark's novel as a response to the conditions of late modernity. In particular, Dark explores the pressures exerted on local space by modern capitalism in a period of post-war reconstruction, showing how the national and global scales encroach upon and threaten to annihilate local particularity. Through drawing on a number of broadly modernist practices, including those of entanglement, suspension, metageography and primitivism, Dark pushes back against modernity's narratives of progress and attempts to recover space for the literary and the small scale. Lantana Lane demonstrates how ‘regional modernisms’ written from ‘peripheral’ locations can draw attention to the uneven distribution of modernity within national and global space, and offer alternative — if provisional — sites of attachment. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent editions ofAustralian Humanities Review(2008) andCultural Studies Review(2010) mapped an emerging field of cultural studies devoted to rural Australia, uncovering the ways metropolitan biases tended to underpin studies of rural change. This paper builds upon that work by canvassing the mediation of meaning and interests that can occur when doing cultural studies in a wildly non-urban place. It draws on a new study of the lived experience of cyclone in Far North Queensland, where the people are allegedly ‘bred tough’ – and where the researcher grew up. While producing an oral-historical account that centres upon the voices of ‘survivors’, the project also reinterprets ‘cyclone’ as a cultural site, where stories of survival, both symbolic and literal, intersect. In that context, this paper examines the tensions involved in critiquing discursive and material histories and realities through embedded rural research practice, here depicted as a dialogic interchange with place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article argues that literary modernism in English-speaking countries outside Great Britain and the U.S. was related to "cultural nationalism." It compares modernism in Australia and in Canada, aiming to explain why Canadian modernism and nationalism were closely related while Australian modernism was opposed to literary nationalism. Factors discussed include differing orientations toward Great Britain, the isolation of Australian culture, and the cosmopolitanism of Canadian writers.