Association For The Study Of Australian Literature

'Locating Australian Literary Memory' explores the cultural meanings suffusing local literary commemorations. It is orientated around eleven authors – Adam Lindsay Gordon, Joseph Furphy, Henry Handel Richardson, Henry Lawson, A. B. ‘Banjo’ Paterson, Nan Chauncy, Katharine Susannah Prichard, Eleanor Dark, P. L. Travers, Kylie Tennant and David Unaipon – who have all been celebrated through a range of forms including statues, huts, trees, writers’ houses and assorted objects. Brigid Magner illuminates the social memory residing in these monuments and artefacts, which were largely created as bulwarks against forgetting. Acknowledging the value of literary memorials and the voluntary labour that enables them, she traverses the many contradictions, ironies and eccentricities of authorial commemoration in Australia, arguing for an expanded repertoire of practices to recognise those who have been hitherto excluded.

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

Contains items from the Association for the Study of Australian Literature Conferences for 1978 and 1979, including agenda, information bulletins, minutes of annual meeting and financial statements and abstracts of papers presented.

I tell you that this story of my own is part of a much older story... one of a perpetual billowing from the sea, with its rhythm of return, return, remain... I offer these words, especially to those of you I embarrass, and who turn away from the shame of seeing me... We are still here, Benang.