Tag: Martin Harrison

The Revolution Starts on Monday: Tamar Chnorhokian and the case for subjectivity

SoutherlyBlog

by Luke Carman I want to tell you about Tamar. The publication of The Diet Starts on Monday by Armenian-Australian writer Tamar Chnorhokian was the realisation of a long and collectively held dream for everyone in involved. For Tamar, it meant becoming a novelist, for us at SWEATSHOP, it was an opportunity to contribute a genuinely unique single-author work of fiction to the frustratingly narrow world of Australian literature (sceptics can order a copy here and see for themselves). Tamar’s novel is a deceptively simply young adult tale: an obese girl with a secret crush on the hottest boy at school sets…

… read more

The architecture of grass

SoutherlyBlog3 Comments on The architecture of grass

by Tom Lee In Bill Gammage’s remarkable book on the land care practices of the first Australians, The Biggest Estate on Earth,‘grass’ is among the most frequently indexed words. It’s up there with ‘Europeans’, ‘animals’, and ‘forest’. In the ‘grass’ entry in the index the reader is told to see also “clearings; fire; grass names; plains”, and the subcategories include: introduced, native, beside water, corridors (see also belts, paths), and on good soil. The word’s semantic reach includes more than half the book. Why is this word so central to Gammage’s thesis? Because the first Australians were experts at caring…

… read more