Category: 78.2

My Spine, Your Pillow

Southerly78.2

Daniel John Pilkington When the sun sets and everything is cellophane Exquisite adjectives Velleity Thoughts that make us feel younger Names for stray cats Dumplings Psilocybin The significance of hair The heating should be more than quiet A hierarchy of self-contradictions When a man lives alone The most common dreams Humidities Theories of why we laugh Artifacts we dare to call natural My favourite apocalypse Plums Things once thought to be aphrodisiacs Things that suggest hidden worlds Possible bookmarks Hypocrisies Numbing things Once when I understood my anger When I was the first to leave and the last to arrive…

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Nicholas Birns reviews ‘Australian Books and Others in the American Marketplace’ by David Carter and Roger Osborne

Southerly78.2

David Carter and Roger Osborne, Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace: 1840s to 1940s. University of Sydney Press 2018, xii + 366 pp ISBN 9781743325797 RRP $50.00 David Carter and Roger Osborne’s volume looks at publishing history as a form of literary history. The authors’ proficiency in the archive and their thoroughness of research tells a story of both the splendors and, far more, the miseries of the reception of Australian books in the United States, The book is like a detective story (appropriately, the authors mention mystery writers Fergus Hume and Arthur Upfield as major Australian exports).…

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Kathleen Davidson reviews ‘Falling Backwards’ by Jo Jones

Southerly78.2

Jo Jones, Falling Backwards: Australian Historical Fiction and the History Wars, UWA Publishing, 2018, 250 pp, pb, ISBN 9781742589916 RRP $39.99 Jo Jones’s Falling Backwards is balanced on the notion that “Some stories are hard to tell.” The question of how best to engage with this trauma—how to look back, openly and sensitively, into the darkness of Australia’s colonial past—is at the heart of her volume. The titular image of falling backwards gestures towards this work’s primary insight. Falling is usually an involuntary act. Yet, in acknowledging that we must tumble loose from our present assumptions, we might open ourselves…

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A Breeze Blows, or It Doesn’t Blow: History’s Beckonings

Southerly78.2

Roanna Gonsalves I wanted it to be true. I wanted it to be true because it was there in the primary sources. It was there in the journals and the biographies: slaves bought and sold in India, in Arabia. The trans-Indian Ocean slave trade and the slave trade within India that passed by other names. Black men bought and sold them. Brown men bought and sold them. White men were sometimes good to do business with. Governor Lachlan Macquarie bought two of them. He says so himself. All the biographers have tracked this down. Centuries pass. The memory of slavery…

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Uli Krahn: Postcards from Kings Cross

Southerly78.2

This suite of poems is part of the Long Paddock series for 78.1 Festschrift: David Brooks.                              23 Start with explaining intelligence prof, says the little pigeon. Fortunately, Adorno has been paying attention. How do you find back after going to the tasty trees in the park? The ibises look blank. You sort of look, and there’s stuff and places you know and … says That ibis. No, coo the pigeons. You shut your eyes, and then you know. One ibis honks in disgust. Classic pigeon logic.…

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Geoff Page: Letter to David Brooks

Southerly78.2

Dear David As someone who grew up on a cattle station and still (very occasionally) eats red meat, I’ve been reading your article, ‘The Fallacies”, in the latest Southerly with considerable interest. I agree that the“fallacies” you identify there can actually be quite useful, both as cautions and enablers. I’ve also had similar reservations to yours about the reception of, and enthusiasm for, many postmodern ideas. In numerous ways these ideas have been liberating (in dissuading us, for instance, from pointlessly pursuing Absolute Truth and other chimeras) but they can also be disabling when taken too seriously and institutionalised. Certainly…

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