A fresh twenty-first century look at Australian literature in a broad, inclusive and multicultural sense.

This international collection of eleven original essays on Australian Aboriginal literature provides a comprehensive critical companion that contextualizes the Aboriginal canon for scholars, researchers, students, and general readers.

Winner of the Miles Franklin Award. Two of David Foster's previous books, Dog Rock and The Pale Blue Crochet Coathanger, feature the eccentric postman D'Arcy D'Olivieres, a great and memorable creation, and one who makes a welcome return to Foster's fiction in The Glade Within the Grove. Now the retired postman of Dog Rock, D'Arcy recalls a time when he was a fill-in postman at a small town called Obligna Creek. There he discovers an unpublished manuscript in an old mailbag - The Ballad of Erinungarah, written by 'Orion'. As D'Arcy himself says, 'Weird piece of work. Back then, 1990, I'm not sure I understood the implications. But I have thought about little else since.' D'Arcy becomes obsessed by the Ballad and the events it describes, and writes The Glade Within The Grove as a gloss on the Ballad, and investigation of events that happened nearly thirty years ago: namely the establishment of a commune in the late 60s, deep in the forest country of the Far South Coast, somewhere near the NSW/Victorian border. The valley is a paradise, populated sparsely by isolated logging and rural families. It is literally stumbled upon by a famous 60s rock guitarist, Michael Ginnsy, who loses his dog in the valley, goes in to find him, is taken under the wing of two old hippies, Phryx and Gwen, who show him the way out of the inaccessible and impenetrable valley. Returning to Sydney, he can't stop talking about this idyllic place, and is eventually persuaded by a motley group of people at a wake for Martin Luther King to let them join him and attempt to find the valley. So they set off in the Kombi: hippies, a former pin-up girl, a drug dealer, junkies, rich kids looking for excitement, a Marxist. In the days of the anti-Vietnam movement, this disparate group are all variously pursuing alternative lives, so a commune is the obvious answer when they literally stumble (again) upon the valley paradise. The link between country and city is forged when Attis, a foundling looked after by the logging family, and Diane, the youngest, feistiest and most radical of the city group, meet at a rodeo and instantly fall in love. Then they find abandoned the hut where the old hippies Phryx and Gwen lived, and discover they were killed by a lone anti-logging terrorist, who has found a Sacred Grove of 1000 year old cedars deep in the valley, and is trying to protect them from the outside world. Newcomers and suspicious old-timers must work together to save paradise from the madman.

More than any other event in Australia’s legal, political and cultural history, the High Court of Australia’s 1992 Mabo decision challenged previous ways of thinking about land, identity, belonging, the nation and history. Now, more than a quarter of a century after Mabo, this book examines the broader impacts of this landmark legal decision on various forms of Australian culture and cultural practice. How is Australia’s post-Mabo imaginary being reflected, refracted and articulated in contemporary film, fiction, poetry, biography and other forms of cultural expression? To what extent has the discussion and practice of history, linguistics, anthropology and other branches of the humanities been challenged or transformed by Mabo? While the judges in Mabo recognised native title, they also denied Indigenous people sovereignty over the continent: how is First Nations sovereignty being articulated and creatively imagined in more recent post-Mabo discourse? This interdisciplinary book, offering a transnational perspective via scholars based in Australia, continental Europe and the UK, provides an overview of the diverse impact and discursive influence of Mabo on fields of artistic endeavour and cultural practice in Australia today.

Australia has been seen as a land of both punishment and refuge. Australian literature has explored these controlling alternatives, and vividly rendered the landscape on which they transpire. Twentieth-century writers left Australia to see the world; now Australia’s distance no longer provides sanctuary. But today the global perspective has arrived with a vengeance. In Contemporary Australian Literature: A World Not Yet Dead, Nicholas Birns tells the story of how novelists, poets and critics, from Patrick White to Hannah Kent, from Alexis Wright to Christos Tsiolkas, responded to this condition. With rancour, concern and idealism, modern Australian literature conveys a tragic sense of the past yet an abiding vision of the way forward. Birns paints a vivid picture of a rich Australian literary voice – one not lost to the churning of global markets, but in fact given new life by it. Contrary to the despairing of the critics, Australian literary identity continues to flourish. And as Birns finds, it is not one thing, but many. "In this remarkable, bold and fearless book, Nicholas Birns contests how literary cultures are read, how they are constituted and what they stand for … In examining the nature of the barriers between public and private utterance, and looking outside the absurdity of the rules of genre, Birns has produced a redemptive analysis that leaves hope for revivifying a world not yet dead." - John Kinsella

Charts the history of South Asian diaspora, weaving together stories of various peoples colonized by the British Empire.