Australian Public Intellectual [API] Network

Network Scholars

Manufacturing the Canon: Australia in the Chinese Literary Imagination

Peter C Pugsley
Over the past fifty years, a broad range of translated Australian literary texts have been published in China. An examination of the texts selected for translation offers a perspective on Chinese attitudes toward Australian literature and culture. This article will examine translated Australian novels, which represent one site of 'contact/collision' between Australian and Chinese culture, in order to track the interpretive processes through which meaning is reconstructed by a Chinese audience.1 I propose that literary works chosen for translation from the 1950s to the 1970s were ideologically ...
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Network Review of Books

All the Iron Night (2004)

Reviewed by Helen Hagemann in the June 2004 issue.
Ross Bolleter's All the Iron Night is an impressive collection. This hardbound volume of forty poems is magnetic, solid and full of strength. The human fabric of home, love, and relationships is deftly conveyed. Strong images and themes of urban and country life and identities abound. His images of an outback landscape sit well with lengthy pieces that expose the saving grace of Zen Buddhism. Forms range from narrative and free verse to haiku and renga. The renga, Old Dog, is a collaborative work with Susan Murphy. Bolleter is a listener as well as a careful observer. He's not ... read more.

Griffith Review: Addicted to Celebrity (2004)

Reviewed by Tony Smith in the February 2005 issue.
On the day this collection arrived on my desk, about a quarter of the features page of one of Australia's broadsheet newspapers was occupied by musings about a tennis player's courtship behaviour. The sportsman was keeping company with an Australian singer, but his attentions had apparently wandered towards an American girl famous mainly for being famous. The meaning(s) of this preoccupation with people who are perennial subjects of media output, and why it matters, are the themes explored in Addicted to Celebrity. The collection, containing critically fearless works by a company of astute ... read more.

Blue Moon (2004)

Reviewed by Zora Simic in the June 2005 issue.
Carolyn Van Langenberg gives good title and it's only now, having just finished her ambitious trilogy of novels -- Fish Lips (2002), The Teetotaller's Wake (2003) and Blue Moon (2004) -- that I fully appreciate this particular skill. Looking back, they tell me everything and nothing I need to know about what happens between the covers. The titles evoke the author's key preoccupations -- families, dreams, cultural encounters, passion, love, sexuality, grief, nostalgia, location, dislocation -- without giving too much away. Indeed, Van Langenberg is all about the slow unravelling of a story, a ... read more.

The Films of Peter Weir (2004)

Reviewed by Andrew Mason in the September 2005 issue.
Those readers who are expecting a film history or handy taxonomy of Australian director Peter Weir's work will not find it in Jonathan Rayner's The Films of Peter Weir (Second Edition). Rayner teaches Media Studies within the School of English at the University of Sheffield and released the first edition of this book in 1998. Rayner is also the author of Contemporary Australian Cinema. (2000) Whilst overall Rayner's The Films of Peter Weir breaks Weir's body of work into groupings of years, within each discussion of a particular film Rayner is not restricted to a sequential or ... read more.

The English in Australia (2004)

Reviewed by Tara Brabazon in the July 2004 issue.
This review of James Jupp's The English in Australia -- quite appropriately -- juts out of the most English city in the country. Perth is the home of more English migrants, as a proportion of population, than any other Australian metropolis. The reviewer of this book shares a surname with the man who founded Empire Day. But these statistics, identities and ancestors only tell part of the story. Englishness moves, morphs and changes. It also re-emerges in unexpected places, particularly in popular culture. While crisp bee-bee-see accents spill from the lips of Austen-inspired heroines and ... read more.

Lives in Limbo: Voices of Refugees Under Temporary Protection (2004)

Reviewed by Tony Smith in the September 2004 issue.
In mid 2004, the Australian Government made two decisions that taken at face value, seemed to indicate a softening of policy towards asylum seekers. While previous governments had far from perfect records in relation to our responsibility to refugees, the Howard Government has been severely criticised for exploiting the plight of asylum seekers for political gain. The list of accusations is long but it includes: mandatory detention, turning vessels away, changing the nation's boundaries, compromising Pacific neighbours, contracting out responsibility for remote camps, denying media access to ... read more.

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