Author: Southerly Guest Blogger

Beyond tropes: Why Eve Langley’s legacy must be understood through a trans inclusive lens

Southerly Guest BloggerBlogLeave a Comment on Beyond tropes: Why Eve Langley’s legacy must be understood through a trans inclusive lens

Sam Elkin The sad tale of Eve Langley, author of the 1942 picaresque classic The Pea Pickers, has transfixed readers for generations. The Pea Pickers, a fictionalised autobiography, tells the story of Steve and Blue, two gender non-conforming sisters who don men’s attire to work as agricultural labourers outside Bairnsdale in Gippsland during the Great Depression. The book, long accepted as an Australian classic (albeit one marred by racism), perhaps captivates readers today less than the sad, complex story of Langley themselves. Soon after the publication of The Pea Pickers, Langley was sent to a mental asylum in Auckland as…

… read more

By the People, For the People: Trans Poetics and DIY Culture, Part 2: The Ephemeral Things That Save Us

Southerly Guest BloggerBlogLeave a Comment on By the People, For the People: Trans Poetics and DIY Culture, Part 2: The Ephemeral Things That Save Us

Rae White Acknowledgement: This piece was written on stolen lands in Magandjin, the lands of the Jagera and Turrbal people. Sovereignty was never ceded. This always was and always will be Aboriginal land. One of the most fascinating things about zines and open mics is how temporary they are compared to the endurance of their emotional impact. A zine fair might last six hours at a local hall. An open mic might run for an evening before everyone disperses into the night carrying notebooks full of half-finished poems. But these fleeting gatherings can completely alter the trajectory of a person’s…

… read more

By the People, For the People: Trans Poetics and DIY Culture, Part 1: ‘Jagged Edges and Rough Words’

Southerly Guest BloggerBlogLeave a Comment on By the People, For the People: Trans Poetics and DIY Culture, Part 1: ‘Jagged Edges and Rough Words’

Rae White Acknowledgement: This piece was written on stolen lands in Magandjin, the lands of the Jagera and Turrbal people. Sovereignty was never ceded. This always was and always will be Aboriginal land. I’m at one of my fave poetry open mics, Echoes from the Cave Inn, waiting for my name to be called. The crowded room is full of fellow queer, trans, and gender diverse people eating freshly made pizza, sipping beers, and hugging mates they haven’t seen since last month’s open mic. I get up on stage wearing my jorts, and bright pink and orange tie-dye shirt that…

… read more

Binary Opposition

Southerly Guest BloggerBlogLeave a Comment on Binary Opposition

Rashida Murphy Some years ago, a writer told me she didn’t believe in binary oppositions. This wealthy, white, well-connected woman, a theorist whose intense dislike of de Saussure was reflected in her work, argued that she did not have a structural advantage over an immigrant brown woman in publishing. Race and resources were not a factor in literary success and the real issue, she insisted, was talent. Then came the clincher—stories like yours are the flavour of the month, she said. For several years, I tried to believe the lofty ideal she had proposed. I focused on the real issue…

… read more

Luminous with Manifold Illusion: Rereading as Postmortem or Death of the Poet

Southerly Guest BloggerBlogLeave a Comment on Luminous with Manifold Illusion: Rereading as Postmortem or Death of the Poet

Georgia Rose Phillips “I can recover my calm by living the metaphors of the ocean.” – Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 28.   The day I heard a line from Ashbery’s poem “Syringa” when walking up Semaphore beach (“The seasons are no longer what they once were”), something equally as intriguing started to transpire. Ashbery’s line prompted me to think of the final two lines of TS Eliot’s poem “The Hollow Men”. This oft-quoted work ends on the troubling but oracular note, “This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but with a whimper”. As…

… read more

Enter the Ghost, Exit the Ghost: Rereading as a Haunting–Phantom Texts, Hauntology and Spectral Readers

Southerly Guest BloggerBlogLeave a Comment on Enter the Ghost, Exit the Ghost: Rereading as a Haunting–Phantom Texts, Hauntology and Spectral Readers

Georgia Rose Phillips For a long time, I have been rereading John Ashbery’s poem “Syringa” in the way I occasionally reread certain poems—feeling as if the lines I have committed to memory have become the echo of my own emotion. When I experience grief, I often hear the line from Joy Harjo’s poem, “Desire”, “Say the stars have never learned / to say goodbye” (99). I see a muted twinkle against a stretch of navy and feel the pang of the star’s condition of being permanently suspended outside the redemptive thralls of language. When I first learnt how to create…

… read more

In Praise of Rereading: Iterative Inhabitations and Sheltering the Paradise of Words

Southerly Guest BloggerBlog1 Comment on In Praise of Rereading: Iterative Inhabitations and Sheltering the Paradise of Words

Georgia Rose Phillips Sometimes, the line of a poem leaps out unexpectedly from the well of my consciousness when I encounter something close to what it resembles in the real world. On an unseasonably cold November day in Semaphore, South Australia late last year, I heard a line from Ashbery’s “Syringa” as I walked up the beach. I had been pressing through the afternoon’s sharp sandy gusts and feeling the overhang of winter in the cold sting of the breeze. As I moved towards the grey surface of water, dotted with white foamy caps, I had been starting to doubt…

… read more

I had no words to describe my self: Job scarcity and identity in the dying university

Southerly Guest BloggerBlog1 Comment on I had no words to describe my self: Job scarcity and identity in the dying university

Jessie Seymour Check email again. Not expecting anything, but not quite able to stop myself. There’s a new message. It’s a rejection. Automated and impersonal. Doesn’t even have my name at the top. Relief. At least it’s an answer. This wasn’t even an academic job. I already applied to those – lectureships, short-term contracts, anything remotely within the field I trained for. No, this was a Casual Janitorial Staff role. They don’t even want me cleaning on campus. I close the inbox. * I’m trying to decide how I feel about being an academic. Or if I’m even allowed to…

… read more

Un/telling y/our story, part four

Southerly Guest BloggerBlog

Amelia Walker Acknowledgement: I live and write on the lands of the Kaurna people. I pay respect to Kaurna Elders, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Sovereignty was never ceded. This always was, always will be Aboriginal land. The seminar room is filling up, colleagues and students ambling in, finding seats. I nod silent greetings to those I know, grinning as though everything is normal, as though I haven’t just recognised an uncomfortable parallel between myself and one of western thought’s most reviled figures. Surely that’s overblown. Heidegger was a card-carrying nazi (Ettinger 10). I’ve simply failed…

… read more

Un/telling y/our story, part three

Southerly Guest BloggerBlog

Amelia Walker Acknowledgement: I live and write on the lands of the Kaurna people. I pay respect to Kaurna Elders, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Sovereignty was never ceded. This always was, always will be Aboriginal land. What does it mean to have loved someone who later loved fascism? The question consuming me as I gaze through the bus window at streets you and I once walked together mirrors one Derrida might have pondered after learning of de Man’s past writings. With them, fascism came before the friendship, so “later” would have been “earlier”. Still, the…

… read more

Un/telling y/our story, part two

Southerly Guest BloggerBlog

Amelia Walker Acknowledgement: I live and write on the lands of the Kaurna people. I pay respect to Kaurna Elders, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Sovereignty was never ceded. This always was, always will be Aboriginal land. I’m still on the bus. That’s a lie. Or is it? As I commit these words, it is later, many laters. I’m curled on a couch, notebook on knees, its pages filling with blue scrawlings I cross out, rewrite, cross out, rewrite, letters smudging as my frantic hand drags across not-yet-dry ink. Now I’m at a desk, squinting as…

… read more

Un/telling y/our story, part one

Southerly Guest BloggerBlog

Amelia Walker Acknowledgement: I live and write on the lands of the Kaurna people. I pay respect to Kaurna Elders, and to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Sovereignty was never ceded. This always was, always will be Aboriginal land. “I have never known how to tell a story” (Derrida 3). So Jacques Derrida declares in March 1984 as he fronts the crowd gathered at Yale University for his first of three lectures honouring the recently deceased Paul de Man, Derrida’s colleague and close friend. Least I’m not the only one, I think, my gaze floating from page to…

… read more