Tag: Australian literature

Emplacement

SoutherlyBlog

by Jessica White ‘One can never fault a Brisbane winter,’ I smugly tell my friends in the south. The air is mild, the light golden, and one only needs a jumper in the evenings. Come summer, though, it’s a different story. I’m far from smug when I’m lying on the couch before a fan blowing hot air into my face. I’ve never lived in a home with air-conditioning and neither do I want to; I resent the sense of being boxed in. On oppressive days I usually go to public places such as a pub or the State Library, but…

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A Short History Of My Sentimental Education

SoutherlyBlog

By Moreno Giovannoni A Sentimental Education My father who died a few weeks ago left me a legacy. He left me the Italian language and Italy and he left me a book. Working backwards through that list of three, the book he left buried inside me and I had to work hard to make it come out. The Italian language he left all around me although over time it became tarnished. But that’s OK. You can’t live in a foreign country like Australia all your life and not start to lose the pristine first language of your youth. Italy itself has…

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“Humor is vengeance.”

SoutherlyBlog

by Roanna Gonsalves The first time I heard the line “Humor is vengeance”, something surged in my brain and my body. I understood its outside as well as its inside, the pitter pat patter of its near perfect dactylic feet, the subatomic particles in its electric charge. Hunting it down, I found it in the second part of Paul Beatty’s Introduction to Hokum: An anthology of African American humour (Bloomsbury, 2006). I knew what Beatty meant by “Humor is vengeance.” I’ve channeled his words to explain my own work in The Permanent Resident, a collection of short fiction published in…

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