Abstract
Several decades ago or more when art was thought of as a liminal flicker at best of North Queensland culture in the anthropological sense, a handful of writers were trying to establish creative writing as a presence. Writing and publishing is a mostly exclusively metropolitan creative industry, so writers often struggle to be published and read outside urban areas. There are still challenges to being a writer in North Queensland—as described in Elizabeth Smyth’s 2016 piece for Meanjin Quarterly, “Sunday Bldy Sunday”.
Highlights
Several decades ago or more when art was thought of as a liminal flicker at best of North Queensland culture in the anthropological sense, a handful of writers were trying to establish creative writing as a presence
Back in the 1990s a few anthologies of tropical North Queensland writing began to appear, writers’ groups began to form, arts bodies started taking notice, and James Cook University established a campus in Cairns where literature and writing were taught and tropical arts became a focus of research
Among the pioneers back was David de Vaux whose small press, El Kumanand, published Spinning the Sun: Stories of Tropical Australia (1995) and Scorpion Tales: Four Tropical Novellas (1996), both edited by David and containing stories by himself and other emerging North Queensland authors
Summary
Several decades ago or more when art was thought of as a liminal flicker at best of North Queensland culture in the anthropological sense, a handful of writers were trying to establish creative writing as a presence. To hand some 20 years later is David de Vaux’s first novel, Cassowary Hill (Glass House Books 2015), a dense readerly work, where the action spans the world from Australia, to South East Asia, to England and America, but the theme is very much anchored in the experience of the tropics and the search for an authentic experience of ‘dwelling’ and ‘being in the world’ as described by Martin Heidegger.
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