AustLit

'How does poetry deal with disability? At the level of theme and voice, Australian poetry – including the theorising and criticism of it – has rarely given overt priority to disabled experience. This essay seeks to contribute to a correction of this neglect by adapting the philosophical approach of Emmanuel Levinas, who wrote of the phenomenological preeminence of the Other. It considers how disability – defined expansively as a bodily otherness which also implicates the self – might become apprehended not only within thematic content, but through the disruptions of poetic form.' (Publication abstract)

'Australia has produced many post-disaster novels since the 1980s, our landscape and sense of global isolation inspiring long lists of environmental and political crises. While this literature provokes considerable work from ecocritical and postcolonial perspectives, the representation or use of disability in post-disaster narratives is less studied. This essay undertakes crip readings of a range of Australian young adult novels published since the 1980s, including Isobelle Carmody’s long running Obernewtyn chronicles (1986-2015) and Ambelin Kwaymullina’s Tribe sequence, particularly The Interrogation of Ashala Wolf (2012) and The Foretelling of Georgie Spider (2015).'(Publication abstract)

'The Gothic lends itself to critical examinations of disabled embodiment, yet this genre has ‘hitherto been largely ignored’ by disability studies scholars (Gregory 291). This essay redresses this omission by exploring disability in three Australian Gothic novels: Elizabeth Jolley's The Well (1986), Sarah Kanake's Sing Fox to Me (2016), and Kate Grenville's Lilian’s Story (1985). On initial glance, The Well and Lilian’s Story conform to the use of disability in the Gothic as a metaphor for social and psychological deviance. However, closer inspection of these novels and Sing Fox to Me demonstrates their resistance to the Gothic’s typical use of disability in phobic ways. Hester’s disability in The Well enables her to transcend the gender prescriptions of her patriarchal Australian community, even if it is initially constructed as a physiological sign of her disturbing possessiveness over Katherine. Against the ‘dramatic and unforgiving natural settings’ of the Tasmanian Gothic (Bullock 72), Sing Fox to Me interweaves Samson’s experience of Down syndrome with perennial themes of the genre including familial haunting and the intersection of past and present. Similar to The Well, Lilian’s Story shows the politically transformative nature of disabled embodiment, wherein the titular character’s fatness and ‘madness’ allow her to achieve self-realisation while defying the gender norms of her time. Ultimately, the three novels suggest that the use of disabled characters in some contemporary Australian Gothic narratives is clearing space for less-stereotypical portrayals of corporeal and psychological variation in this genre.' (Publication abstract)

'In this paper I argue that extending the illness/recovery narrative through the transmedial mode allows for more diverse representation from patients and survivors, leading to greater understanding of varied stories and an enhanced version of Narrative Medicine. Using two transmedial case studies – Dakoda Barker’s threesixfive (2015) and my own interactive memoir How to Knit a Human – I frame my discussion through the lenses of Disability Studies, Mad Studies and Narrative Medicine. Threesixfive evokes Barker’s experience of living with a chronic health condition and the daily struggles and choices one must make throughout each hour. How to Knit a Human utilises choice-based digital storytelling to represent inconsistencies in memory and alternative pathways caused by memory-loss from psychosis and electroconvulsive therapy. I explore these transmedial potentials and encourage survivors to take power and agency in their own valuable lived experiences in order to transform the Narrative Medicine field, which usually only draws on traditional forms of storytelling. I assert that transmedial modes grant greater diversity and flexibility when wielded by survivors. Moreover, once these stories are experienced by others, stigma surrounding disability and/or madness will reduce not only in wider society, but in medicine, education and institutions.'(Publication abstract)

'Francis Webb’s Ward Two is based on Webb’s hospitalisation for schizophrenia in Paramatta in the 1960s, and was the first Australian poetic sequence concerned with the experience of being institutionalised for mental illness. Whilst anti-psychiatrists condemn the harmful influence of psychiatry, and the social model of disability suggests that disability is a social construction, the poetry of Ward Two holds up the nuances of the institution, the society surrounding it and the disabilities suffered by those within. Through a dry, self-deprecating tone characteristic of mid-century Australian poets, and setting himself apart from the Romantics and American confessionals, Webb represents his speaker and other patients as holy, artistic and transcendental. Although the lines are self-consciously ironic, their sonic effects also suggest, in sincere celebration, that the psychiatric subjects have some spiritual quality that others lack. In this liminal space, those condemned by society – the mad, the gay and the mentally disabled – can recover their identities, thoughts and language, even through the process of losing them. While Foucault wrote that psychiatry is a monologue by reason about madness, Webb’s poetry is a monologue about madness by both reason and unreason, as his surrealist lines have the inventive leaps that align it with unreason, but they also have the calm mode of address and high order linguistics to align it with reason. This affords it a unique position through which it can speak about mental illness that sets it apart from the pathologising language of psychiatry, and the romanticising language of anti-psychiatry. I argue that Webb’s poems, synthesising beauty and pain through imagery, rhyme and metaphor, can depict the subtleties of the schizophrenic mind, and the harmful and healing aspects of psychiatry and the institution.' (Publication abstract)

'‘It Allows a Portrait in Line Scan at Fifteen’ is one of Les Murray’s most well-known poems. It was written in 1993, first published in 1994, and featured in his 1996 book Subhuman Redneck Poems. The poem profiles, but does not name, Murray’s and his wife Valerie Murray’s second son (fourth child) Alexander, who, at three, was medically diagnosed as autistic. Both because the poem is Murray’s portrait of his son, and because it was Alexander’s autism diagnosis that prompted Murray’s full recognition of his own autism, this poem is also inherently as much about Murray as it is about Alexander. It explores not only their relationship as parent and child, but each of their relationships with autism, and how their shared autistic love of words, movies, and portraits deepens these relationships.' (Publication abstract)

'Our knowledge of the deafness of major figures in Australian literature, such as Henry Lawson, remains obscure. Other writers who have revealed deafness may not have considered themselves as part of the deaf community. An exception comes from the writings of John Patrick Bourke (circa 1888–1960).' (Publication abstract)

'Through examining Jessica White’s hybrid memoir Hearing Maud and my own work Hysteria: A Memoir of Illness, Strength and Women’s Stories Throughout History, I explore how archival research shapes a disabled writer’s work and written representation of the self. I particularly focus on how memoirists convey the embodied experience of disability through writing lived experience, as well as writing about disabled women they have found through archival research. I consider how writers’ conceptions of the self and body coalesce and depart from the women they are researching. I am intrigued about how, for writers, archival research shapes contemporary disability hybrid memoir writing. In addition, I suggest that imagination accompanies encounters with archival material. Writers imagine the past life of their historical subject(s), and in doing so, imagine beyond ableism. Further, a theme of institutions and how they impact individual lives throughout historical periods emerges.' (Publication abstract)

'Ruth Park’s award-winning novel, Swords and Crowns and Rings had a fascinating, and so far largely unknown, journey to publication. This article traces the editorial and publishing history of the novel and finds that was Park was sent edits that would have limited the agency and nuance of her short-statured character, Jackie Hanna. From my surprising discoveries in the archive, this paper demonstrates that Park resisted these edits, and in doing so acted as an advocate on behalf of her disabled protagonist. She preserved her vision for a character who is a fully rounded human with the intention of conveying his humanity. Combining the tools of critical disability studies with original, archival research and close reading, this analysis establishes that Park largely avoids the narrative prosthesis that commonly troubles ableist renditions of disabled characters (Mitchell, Snyder 2001). This article demonstrates that it is at every level of publishing, from authors through to publishers and editors, that ableist attitudes can inhibit authentic representations of disability in literature.' (Publication abstract)