Australian Literature Research Articles

A Scoping Review of Australian Literature on People Who Use MDMA and Their Harm Reduction Practices

Background: Discourses around MDMA are often predominantly concerned with identifying risk and characterizing harm. Reluctance from Australian governments to reform drug policy and implement harm reduction services has created a policy and service gap, and it is therefore pertinent to consider how people who use MDMA mediate potential harms, and how this knowledge can inform approaches to drug use and policy reform. This community-led scoping review aimed to identify Australian literature on the practices of harm reduction strategies by people who use MDMA. Methods: Seven topic-specific and multidisciplinary databases were searched in February 2023 in line with conventional scoping review methodology. Eligible articles were published from 2002 onwards, reported on the voices of people who use MDMA as primary evidence within the context of Australia, and included at least one strategy to reduce harm. Data were analyzed by drawing on conventional content analysis and thematic analysis frameworks. Results: Twenty-three peer-reviewed and gray literature sources were included. Five key themes were identified on how people mediate harms and enhance the pleasurable aspects of MDMA use: drug consumption practices, planning and preparation, testing drugs, accessing health services, and community care practices. Conclusion: The results suggest that people who use MDMA take care to identify and reduce unwanted harms. The way people who use MDMA make decisions around drugs is mediated by peer groups and online technologies, as well as broader social and cultural contexts of drug use and drug prohibition. More qualitative, participatory, and action research projects are recommended to accurately reflect the views and needs of people who use MDMA and meaningfully shape service reform.

Estimating Ocean Production Values in Regional Coastal Communities: A Case Study from Southern New South Wales

Coastal regions worldwide are highly dependent on the oceans for their economic development, yet the contribution of ocean-dependent industries to regional coastal economies is poorly understood. The literature to date has largely focused on national studies that use a taxonomic approach, that is, they identify the different sectors that constitute the ocean economy and then quantify the contribution of each of those ocean industries. In this article, we present a pragmatic and low-cost approach to estimating the production values of ocean-dependent industries at a community scale, using the southern New South Wales (NSW) coastal region of Australia as a case study. Building on key international and Australian literature, we compiled a representative list of ocean economy industries and then estimated the gross value added (AU $363 million) and employment (2,045 full-time jobs) generated by the ocean economy in this region in 2016. This paper also uses maps and tables of specific areas along the coastal region to illustrate their contribution to and reliance on the ocean economy. The ocean production estimates, developed in this study at a finer geographic scale than previously available, provide crucial baseline data for coastal management, planning and impact assessment. The approach also enhances our awareness of the economic interconnectedness of the ocean, coast and hinterland, which contributes to an improved understanding of regional coastal communities, their economic composition, self-dependence, and resilience.

'Tipping the Scales': Introduction to Australian Literary Studies Literary Value Special Issue

'Tipping the Scales': Introduction to Australian Literary Studies Literary Value Special Issue

Futures of english studies: Australia

AbstractThis paper considers the professionalization of literary studies in Australian universities. It traces ways in which its interdisciplinary formations have been shaped not only by the cultural contexts of colonialism and postcolonialism, but also by institutional factors and budgetary pressures. Nevertheless, it argues this framework has also created intellectual opportunities for positively reshaping the subject so as to bring it into discursive conversation with cognate fields. It suggests that the repositioning of Australian literature and literary studies in relation to World Literature may offer the prospect of opening up the field for the benefit of scholars the world over.

Invisible Words: Cultivating Multilingual Australian Literature

ABSTRACT Australia prides itself on its multicultural identity. This identity is increasingly explored in Australian literature. Yet these narratives are predominately constructed in English, and there is little support for cultivating multilingual writing and literary translation. Despite the lack of support, multilingual Australian literatures do exist, and have existed for centuries, dating back to Australia’s First Nations’ oral, multilingual storytelling traditions. The challenge is to not only document Australia’s multilingual literatures, but to nurture Australia’s literary translation tradition to cultivate a space for multilingual Australian literature within Australia’s literary canon. Prioritising monolingual English literature rejects the nation’s multilingualism, and thus ignores key perspectives through which to examine Australian society. This article firstly analyses multilingual Australian literatures from a historical perspective to examine why multilingual literature has not been actively cultivated as part of Australia’s literary canon. It then highlights key multilingual literary projects from 2010 to explore how multilingual Australian literatures are finding space within the sector and what barriers need to be overcome, and how they can be overcome, to truly foster a multilingual Australian literature that is representative of the nation’s history, landscape and voices.

Addressing the GP vocational training crisis in remote Australia: Lessons from the Northern Territory.

GP vocational training enrolments are declining Australia-wide and, in the Northern Territory (NT), considered by some as '…the litmus test for the national scene' the decline is precipitous. This research investigates the drivers of declining GP training uptake in the NT and identifies and ranks potential solutions. NT, Australia. Ten senior medical students, 6 junior doctors, 11 GP registrars, 11 GP supervisors and 31 stakeholders. Mixed methods: scoping review of Australian literature mapping key concepts to GP training pathway stages and marketing/communications; secondary data analyses; key informant interviews; and a stakeholder validation/prioritisation workshop. Interview data were thematically analysed. Workshop participants received summarised study findings and participated in structured discussions of potential solutions prior to nominating top five strategies in each of five categories. Highly prioritised strategies included increasing prevocational training opportunities in primary care and selecting junior doctors interested in rural generalism and long-term NT practice. Also ranked highly were: [Medical School] ensuring adequate infrastructure; [Vocational Training] offering high quality, culturally sensitive, flexible professional and personal support; [General Practice] better remunerating GPs; and [Marketing] ensuring positive aspects such as diversity of experiences and expedited GP career opportunities were promoted. Multifaceted strategies to increase GP training uptake are needed, which target different stages of GP training. Effective action is likely to require multiple strategies with coordinated action by different jurisdictional and national key stakeholder agencies. Foremost amongst the interventions required is the urgent need to expand primary care training opportunities in NT for prevocational doctors.

Strategies that support cultural safety for First Nations people in aged care in Australia: An integrative literature review.

The 2019 Royal Commission into Aged Care Quality and Safety highlighted the need for First Nations peoples to have improved, culturally safe care. This paper is a call to action for First Nations peoples to be involved in developing culturally safe care and services to be embedded within Australian aged care services. The first screening examined the Australian literature (peer-reviewed articles published since 2010 in English) detailing key aspects relevant to Cultural Safety for First Nations peoples supported by aged care services in Australia. The second screening assessed whether the findings of these studies aligned with the key aspects of Cultural Safety of First Nations peoples in aged care. The initial literature search yielded 198 papers, of which 13 met the inclusion criteria for the final review. Topics that required further interrogation included barriers to communication, racism and discrimination, impacts on health outcomes, health-care workforce education needs and the importance of cultural connections to Country and kin. These topics influenced the perception of First Nations peoples feeling culturally safe when supported by aged care services. The literature identified a need to recruit more First Nations peoples into the aged care workforce, involve more First Nations family and community members in aged care and retain a consistent workforce overall. Together these strategies were seen to address the barriers that continue to affect aged care provision for First Nations peoples.

Review]Iris Ralph, Packing Death in Australian Literature: Ecosides and Eco-Sides, Routledge, 2022, 174pp.

At first glance, a review of Iris Ralph’s Packing Death in Australian Literature (2020) does not fit neatly into an issue themed ‘Strange/Letters’, for, as Ralph’s acknowledgements page indicates, this book grew out of the inaugural 2005 conference of ASLEC-ANZ (then known as ASLE-ANZ). However, Ralph’s analysis, which ‘addresses plants and animals in Australia and its literature’ (1), is very much about strangeness if we consider that, until fairly recently, the contemplation of the nonhuman was an unfamiliar approach to Australian literary criticism.

Moving Beyond a Strange Spectatorship

What can nonhuman road trauma, more commonly referred to as ‘roadkill’, teach us about ecological crises and human culpability? Incidents of nonhuman road trauma could be described as strange encounters, revealing the shared trauma of the nonhumans and humans involved while simultaneously highlighting the supposed inevitability of such events. I argue that the choice to check the rearview mirror – to exhibit attentiveness and care in self-reflection – is an act of radical correspondence with the more-than-human. Such correspondence functions as a kind of non-spoken letter to both nonhumans and other human drivers; a letter calling for acts of care and attentiveness that acknowledge the nonhuman experience, mourn losses, and possibly instigate radical change when it comes to how nonhuman road trauma is thought about now and hopefully avoided in future. In her work on the ‘Anthropocene noir’, Deborah Bird Rose speaks of ‘the Anthropocene parallel’ in which humans are spectators of the suffering of nonhumans, and also spectators of a suffering that is our own. Written as both an essay and a personal log of my own experiences with nonhuman road trauma, this work draws on Rose’s idea in an attempt to reconcile the concept of what I term a ‘strange spectatorship’, in which humans observe, are implicated in, and turn away from the phenomenon of nonhuman road trauma and what such trauma reveals about human-nonhuman relations, particularly for settler-colonial Australians. Reflecting on anecdotal experiences as well as the representation of roadkill in Australian literature, I explore the strangeness perceived in how settler-colonial Australians are both actors and spectators in nonhuman road trauma. I grapple with the idea of such trauma as a means of better understanding the settler-colonial impact on Australian natural environments, and the consequences for both humans and nonhumans if we do not better address the ethical and ecological consequences of our modern road infrastructure.

How We Got Here: A Contextual Review of the Better Access Initiative

This article presents a contextual review of the literature on mental health policy in the global and Australian settings. The review constitutes an analysis of, firstly, the relevant global literature on mental health policy and practice concepts and, secondly, the Australian literature on mental health policy with a particular focus on the Better Access initiative. Finally, the review offers an analysis of the most recent Better Access evaluation and concludes by considering future directions for the initiative.

ТОМАС БЕРНХАРД. ПОРТРЕТ ХУДОЖНИКА В КОМИКСАХ

The article offers an analysis of graphic books based on the works of Thomas Bernhard (1931−1989), the classic of Austrian literature of the 20th century. The material for the study consists of graphic novels, graphic memoirs, and biographical books created by two Austrian artists − Nicholas Maler and Lucas Kummer. The techniques used by the creators in their work with the “hypotext” (G. Genette) − Bernhard's dramatic and narrative oeuvre: the play “The World-Fixer” (Der Weltverbesserer, 1978), the novel “Old Masters: A Comedy” (Alte Meister: Komödie, 1985), and the autobiographical novellas “An Indication of the Cause” (Die Ursache: Eine Andeutung, 1975), “The Cellar: An Escape” (Der Keller: Eine Entziehung, 1976), “Atem: Eine Entscheidung” (Breath: A Decision, 1978), and “In the Cold” (Die Kälte: Eine Isolation, 1981) – are analyzed. Special attention is paid to the methods of conveying the writer's poetics through artistic means, such as drawing techniques, color palette, panel composition, character stylization, and scenes. The selection of thematic complexes (theatricality and metatheatricality, the problem of truth and fiction, trauma, etc.) and the peculiarities of translating the writer's individual literary style (syntax, rhythm and rhetoric, etc.) are examined. The comparative analysis allows to identify similarities and differences in the ways of visualizing and interpreting the literary material, to reveal the diversity of visual solutions and approaches towards the artistic world of Thomas Bernhard. The research results enable a comprehensive understanding of the potential of comics as a means of conveying literary aesthetics and creating a unique visual space that complements and expands the textual dimension of literary works.

Chinese-Australian Culture in a Sinophone History and Geography

ABSTRACT This article proposes to view Australian Chinese cultural products through a Sinophone studies lens to clarify the position of Australia in transnational patterns of Chinese-language cultural production. Three examples illustrate how Sinophone studies can expand research on Chinese-language culture in Australia, by showing them to also be instances of wider phenomena: Chinese-language theatre, Federation-era fiction, and the foreign student literature of the 1990s. Examining how these examples fit into wider patterns of Chinese-language production allows us to expand dyadic views of diaspora or transnationalism while also directing greater attention to community diversity and marginalised texts. The Australian Chinese studies community is right to celebrate the length and breadth of Chinese cultural production in Australia, and considering Sinophone Australian literature and theatre in the context of global Sinophone cultural production can help sharpen perspectives on what is shared and what is particular about the Australian case.

Introduction: Empire and (Post-)Colonialism in Austrian Studies

IntroductionEmpire and (Post-)Colonialism in Austrian Studies Tim Corbett (bio) Globalization, migration, transnationalism, empire/imperialism, (post-)colonialism/decolonization, heterogeneity, diversity, interculturality, cosmopolitanism: These are some of the most influential concepts that have shaped not only academic research but also public and political discourses across the globe in recent years. The field of Austrian studies has already been engaging innovatively and productively with these issues for quite some time now. With a number of pioneering research institutions and corresponding journals on both sides of the Atlantic,1 the field of Austrian studies has since its inception in the postwar period been rooted in a transnational, intercultural, and multilingual context (see most recently Lorenz). Unlike many comparable fields, Austrian studies has therefore from the outset been largely unfettered by the artificial boundaries imposed by language, by the often linguistically imagined "nation-state," or by "culture" however defined in the past century or more (see for example Arens; "Forum: Austrian Studies"). Indeed, it is the very polysemy of the concept "Austria" in multiple geographical, political, cultural, and historical contexts that makes the field of Austrian studies—and its practitioners—so diverse and dynamic. It has been a decade since, in 2012, one of the flagship organizations in the field of Austrian studies, the Association of Modern Austrian Literature, was renamed the Austrian Studies Association, with the association's journal being renamed accordingly, in order to reflect the growing interdisciplinarity of the field. When the journal's former editors, Hillary Hope Herzog and Todd Herzog, handed the baton over to the current editors during the course of [End Page 1] 2021, I saw this as a momentous opportunity to take stock of this vibrant and expanding field and the range of exciting research being conducted therein. Hence the idea for a special volume of the Journal of Austrian Studies dedicated to "New Directions in Austrian Studies" arose, with a call for articles going out in November 2021. The aim of this special volume was to solicit short pieces of no more than about 3,500 words in length, with a twofold reasoning: First, this would allow for a greater number of contributions to the volume, thus offering a more diverse overview of current research being conducted in the field of Austrian studies. Second, this would allow the authors to offer ludic overviews of broad yet incisive concepts, methods, or themes rather than in-depth research articles including expansive references to source materials, which might only have appealed to specialists in their particular areas. This editorial concept was inspired by the 2016 volume Habsburg neu denken (Feichtinger and Uhl), which comprises thirty snapshot articles from the field of Habsburg studies and managed to total only 250 pages. This struck me as an innovative approach to making large research fields accessible to a broad readership. We—the journal editors and I—were astounded by the response we received to our call. As a stocktaking of the current state of the field, the disciplinary and thematic range of the proposals in itself made for interesting reading. We received altogether 42 submissions from 48 authors based in ten different countries, reflecting research projects of an exceptionally high quality across the board. About half the proposals came from scholars based in Austria itself, the rest spread across (East-)Central and Western Europe and the United States, including all career levels, from PhD candidates to professors as well as a number of independent scholars. There was a conspicuous disciplinary concentration on history (albeit with a great diversity of thematic and geographical foci therein), but we also received numerous submissions from the fields of literature studies, film studies, ethnology, musicology, educational studies, political science, and sociology. Given the overarching theme of "Austrian" studies, the geographic scope of the proposed topics was also astounding, covering not only the territory of the modern Austrian Republic and the many disparate lands connected to the former Habsburg Empire but also extending to Eastern, Southern/Southeastern, and Western Europe as well as to North and South America and even further afield to Africa and Asia. The pool of submissions also revealed certain glaring absences. For example, [End Page 2] while we received several contributions focusing...

Towards a hermeneutics of the postmodern transnational space: the case of contemporary Australian literature

The work analyses the “spatial turn” in recent Australian literature, which has led to a new transnational orientation in many contemporary Australian narratives. To do so, it frames literary production in terms of spatial cognition and analyses spatiality and cognition as presented by several scholars in several realms. This theoretical introduction is followed by a more practical examination of recent Australian literary works and changes. Their features show that they are moving ahead of the postcolonial label and influence into a less ideologised position. They are in tune with the new deterritorialisation of the world, and the critical cognitive approach can provide insightful realisations bridging the gap between the actual world and its fictional representation. Finally, these examples and appreciations of the transnational are returned to theoretical ground to demonstrate that space and place, with their variants, are not only useful to (cognitive) literary studies, but to any socio-cultural approach. One of the key uses in this spatial turn towards the transnational lies in the apprehension of space-place as a pathway. It also speaks to the mobility of Australian society and its cultural productions.

“AUSTRIAN WRITER” IN THE TEXT OF W.G. SEBALD: ОN SOME FEATURES OF HIS PROSE STYLE

The literary heritage of an influential German writer and academical literary critic of the late twentieth century W.G. Sebald (1944–2001) is considered in relation to the essential features of Austrian literature (as a special phenomenon) identified by N.S. Pavlova, and in the context of its important topics. The article traces Sebald’s rise as an outstanding prose writer in parallel with how his interest as an academic Germanist was focusing on the work of Austrian writers (from Adalbert Stift er, 1805–1868, to Peter Handke, b. 1942), how he was familiarizing himself with fundamentals of their worldview (distrust of reality; lack of confidence in the state, homeland and the language; deep intimacy with ‘things’; dominance of sensation over judgment) and acute topics (physical and mental pain, illness, homelessness, isolation). Some pieces of Sebald’s prose are compared here to the work of the Austrian writers (Franz Kafka and Th omas Bernhard in particular) to study his extremely mobile and multi-layered perspective of narration, which is characteristic for all his texts and lies at the core of the specifics of his literary style. The article aims not only to show some important features of Sebald’s prose (the multilevel mediation of perspective, ‘network structures’ within the text) in their connection to Austrian literature of the last two centuries, but also to demonstrate that they were formed largely due to his deep understanding of this literature.

A Review of Neurocognitive Interpretations of Australian Literature: Criticism in the Age of Neuroawareness

A Review of <i>Neurocognitive Interpretations of Australian Literature: Criticism in the Age of Neuroawareness</i>

Trojans in the Antipodes: The Fabrication of Epic Ancestry and Imperial Destiny in Colonial Australian Literature

When Europeans settled on the Australian continent, Britain’s connections to the Greco-Roman classical tradition were being actively promoted as an inherent component of the empire’s cultural heritage. Since the foundation of the Australian colony of New South Wales, comparisons between the British dominion and classical antiquity were made in the hope that one day soon the history and literature of the new settlement would rival that of their cultural ancestors. Colonial Australian literature often focussed on the great potential the young civilization might enjoy. Because the geographical distance between Australia and Europe was so vast, connections to European cultural heritage were often laboriously constructed. This article focusses on the work of Michael Massey Robinson, a freed convict employed to write poetry by the New South Wales Governor, Lachlan Macquarie, from 1810. Drawing on the British legend of Brutus of Troy, recorded by the twelfth-century cleric Geoffrey of Monmouth in his Historia Regum Britanniae, Robinson casts the British decedents of Aeneas as the founders of the Australian continent, and ancestors of the Trojan people. By emphasizing Australia’s connections to the ancient world through ancestral lineage, the great potential of the young civilization could be celebrated, and by linking Australia’s European settlement to the foundation of both Rome and Britain, colonial Australia was characterized as being at the beginning of a very long history that, based on historical precedent, would eventually result in a great and esteemed empire.

Integrating the exploration-exploitation dilemma and bad institutions to the Austrian theory of destructive entrepreneurship: a new perspective

AbstractContemporary Austrian theory has expanded widely on the relationship between entrepreneurship and the structure of production, yet it has never touched on the existence of an exploration-exploitation dilemma within organizations. The objective of the article is to show that the integration of the exploration-exploitation dilemma into the Austrian theory adds new fruitful elements to the function of the destructive entrepreneur, as presented by the Austrian economists of the firm. By showing how an organization's complexity can motivate destructive entrepreneurship on competition, it firstly explains how their analytical tools, which were limited in this area to the infra-organizational field, can also be applied to the catallactic field; it secondly enriches the traditional Austrian vision of the relation between institutions and entrepreneurship, in highlighting a reverse causal relationship, that has not yet been pointed by Austrian literature on entrepreneurship, between bad institutions and the destructive entrepreneur.

Beneath the Sea, Inland: Reading Aquifers and Opals in Australian Literature

ABSTRACT Deep beneath the surface of the continent, memories of the ancient Eromanga Sea are retained in subterranean aquifers and the veins of opal that flash above them in lithic fissures. The excavation of these hidden resources has been critical to the advancement of establishing the settler-colony, Australia, and in perpetuating the ongoing violence of Indigenous dispossession. In this paper, I examine the entangled subterranean figures of aquifers and opals as they surface in the Australian literary archive. I read early twentieth century representations of groundwater usage and opal mining communities in works by Banjo Paterson and Katharine Suzannah Prichard against contemporary evocations of these themes in novels by Janette Turner Hospital (Oyster) and Tara June Winch (Swallow the Air). In doing so, I explore the challenges of representing, reading and interpreting deep watery spaces.*

Neurocognitive Interpretations of Australian Literature: Criticism in the Age of Neuroawareness, by Jean-François Vernay

Rewiev a: Jean-François Vernay, Neurocognitive Interpretations of Australian Literature: Criticism in the Age of Neuroawareness, New York: Routledge, 2021, 158 pp.