Ms James' 2024 12 Lit Class Blogs - Aus Lit

Les Murray's  Inside Ayers Rock  (1995) on my first read left me feeling dazed; a flurry of perplexing yet vivid images bombarded me. As quickly as they filled my mind with the unimaginable, they dissipated, leaving me entirely empty. Odd emotions  tied to images I never would've imagined on my own: strong nostalgia for a time I never lived in, images of an old shopping mall captured on a  shaky camcorder  but also an inexplicable weariness & disconcertment grew as I delved deeper into Murray’s bizarre world; one where Uluru (or Ayer's Rock) has been hollowed out & transformed into a quiet tourist attraction.  . . . Speedrunning 'Liminal Spaces': building liminality, familiarity & fear? Liminal spaces, described as 'waiting' or 'transitional' spaces, capture a unique sense of being 'in-between'. Originally bustling with activity & heavy foot traffic, they now often sit eerily empty and lifeless. This dissociation of visual rea...

  It's interesting, the way some lines of poetry stay with you. Maybe because of something magical about their language or the feelings they play on, the images they evoke or all these things together. I sometimes find myself lying awake at night at the thought of the ungraspable passage of time, seconds flying into years. I’m sure Eiichiro Oda feels the same, his anime One Piece which he revealed was originally planned to last five years, has now been ongoing for over 20 years. (will Luffy ever become pirate king…) This image of times flight I often find myself picturing has been captured by australian poet Kenneth Slessor in his poem “Out of Time,” a poem that captures the paradoxical duality of time with its sensation of both mortality and eternity, and our perception of time in regards to inevitable death. It is comprised of 3 acts over the course in which the speaker comes to terms with the flow of time and the beauty of living in the moment. =================================...

Australians all let us rejoice, for we are young and free. Ahh.. the sweet sound of the patriotic Australian anthem, proclaiming the joy derived from the pure freedom of ALL Australians. The verses we all memorised (willingly or unwillingly) in our younger years of primary school, the distinct perfect fourth which marks this nationally renowned song... Wait.. hang on a minute. Free? ALL Australians? Let me quickly insert the two definitions of free which appear upon a quick Google search. Hmm. That doesn’t sound quite right to me. And Samuel Wagon Watson doesn't seem to think so either. Who IS Samuel Wagon Watson? Samuel Wagon Watson is a contemporary Indigenous poet from the city of Brisbane. His father, Samuel William Watson was an Aboriginal Australian activist from the 1970s, who in later life stood as a Socialist Alliance candidate. He is known for being a co-founder of the Australian Black Panther Party in 1971/2 and was involved in implementing the findings of the Royal Com...

This place, ain't no such thing as civilised. It is man, so in love with greed that he has forgotten himself and found only appetites” -          Red Dead Redemption II Apologies for leading into my blog with a pretentious quote. In my defence, it was not translated from a Babylonian proverb or a black-and-white Akira Kurosawa film. It came from a video game – so we’re immediately dealing with low-brow stuff here. This rambling introduction is actually rather fitting, as the poem that I shall dissect was not written by a Renaissance polymath, but a true-blue ocker – whose other works include “The Dream of Wearing Shorts Forever”, and who mockingly described himself as a “subhuman redneck” (though this was really a dig at intellectual elitists). In reality, the man was complex, witty and verbose – Australia’s “bush-bard”. And he wrote mostly about the bush, but the po...

Judith Wright. Mother, millionaire, law student, billio- no wait that's Kim K, let me restart. Judith Wright, a renowned Australian poet and Aboriginal land rights activist, has written over 400 poems over her 60-year career, all beautifully laced with natural imagery that links the themes of her poems (including love, motherhood and appreciation of the natural environment), with various core aspects of the universe – night and day, darkness and light, stars, planets and life itself.   Her 1949 collection ‘Woman to Man’ explores in depth a woman’s experiences and recollections as she prepares to welcome her unborn child to the world. The first three poems, entitled ‘Woman to Man ’, ‘Woman’s Song’ and ‘Woman to Child ’, which focus on motherhood and the relationship between mother and child by using various symbols taken from the natural world, like threads, night and day, darkness and light, and the concept of an ecosystem. Before delving into that cosmic soup, let’s invest...