Paper: Liquid Order: Water, Border, and the Survivalist Imagination    

Abstract: Can liquid matter order the fictional medium? How does water shape structures of ecological feeling in imagining chaotic futures? This paper gives provisional answers to these questions in the hope of moving towards a material framework to better understand the matrix of production, legitimation and consumption in contemporary (Australian) eco-fiction. I use ‘liquid order’ to theorise water as an organising principle for the survivalist imagination; i.e. the contemporary fiction and the mechanisms of its publishing have internalised a border imaginary based on an imminent civilisational collapse brought about by water. It is true that water is terrifying for its material properties (rising, acidifying, drying), but more so—I argue—for its capacity to dissolve borders that heavily police human and non-human traffic: what we thought we could safely flush down there can suddenly appear here: the environmental refugees, the nanoplastic, the millions of tons of oceanic garbage.

Bio: Keyvan Allahyari (PhD, Melbourne 2019) is Marie Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oslo, Norway. Prior to this, he was a Humboldt Research Fellow at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and the Fryer Library Fellow at the University of Queensland. He is the author of Peter Carey: The making of a Global Novelist (Palgrave 2023), and Liquid Materiality: Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Oceanic World Literature (forthcoming by Routledge). Keyvan writes about the link between materiality, ecological futures and systems of cultural distribution. He has published widely on Australian literature and publishing, critical border studies, oceanic humanities, and human geography. 

Paper: Between Chaos and Order: Unveiling ‘Kaspar‘ as a Pillar of Absurdist Drama

Abstract: This paper challenges recent scholarly perspectives that distance Peter Handke’s ‘Kaspar’ from the Theatre of the Absurd, specifically countering J.H. Knap’s assertion that the play does not conform to Absurdist principles. It examines how ‘Kaspar’ encapsulates the perpetual conflict between chaos and order, reflected in the protagonist’s struggle against imposed linguistic structures—a mirror to the broader Absurdist narrative of human disorientation in an illogical world. Utilising John Frow’s genre theory, the analysis assesses ‘Kaspar’ through the lens of generic conventions and expectations. Frow’s focus on textual function and social context helps identify Absurdist elements in the play, challenging Knap’s interpretation by demonstrating how ‘Kaspar’ conforms to and expands the Absurdist genre norms. Additionally, the paper explores linguistic disintegration, fragmented dialogue, and chaotic actions in ‘Kaspar’, paralleled with ‘Waiting for Godot’s’ irrational actions, circular conversations and nonsensical speech to emphasise the thematic persistence of miscommunication and the absurdity of human existence. Through these analytical lenses, the paper aims to substantiate ‘Kaspar’s significance within Absurdist drama, highlighting its influence on the genre’s evolution and enriching our understanding of its thematic dimensions. This re-evaluation not only confirms the play’s genre classification but also deepens insights into the interplay between chaos and order in contemporary theatrical expressions.

Bio: Sarah is a dedicated Teaching Assistant with extensive experience in English Literature. She is pursuing a Master of English Studies at the University of Sydney, having previously graduated with a high GPA in English Language from Taif University. At Umm Al-Qura University, Sarah has supported students in understanding complex literary concepts, grading assignments, and facilitating study groups. Her expertise includes critical and professional writing, enhanced by specialised units at the University of Sydney. Sarah’s commitment to fostering positive learning environments and her innovative teaching methods underscore her academic and professional development.

Paper: Chris Flynn’s Mammoth

Abstract: In his 2020 novel Mammoth, Chris Flynn frames the chaos of extinction with satire and comedy, facilitating new means of creation and instilling hope into a potentially hopeless narrative. Through the voices of a mammoth, a Tyrannosaurus bataar, a penguin, and the hand of an Egyptian mummy, Flynn gives an extensive oral history of deep time going back one hundred and fifty million years, accounting for periods of climate change, extinction, the rise and fall of civilisations, and the discovery and commodification of fossils. This paper examines how Flynn challenges anthropocentrism and engages the politics of animal exploitation through the slow violence of extinction. Flynn does not attempt to simplify or finalise the tragedy of extinction but rather, through the tools of satire and comedy, instils critical hope into the chaos of extinction, producing a text that navigates both the realism of history and the imaginative hope of science fiction.  

Bio: Caitlin Anderson is undertaking a PhD in the School of Art, Communication and English at The University of Sydney. Her doctoral research, which focuses on human and animal relationships and communication in post-2018 Australian fiction, responds to a fast-evolving global subject and enacts a vital teleological investigation into human and ecological interdependence. Caitlin’s thesis traces and analyses how authors are adapting the conventions and extending the limits of fiction as a response to the intersection of environmental, social, and cultural issues in a context of climate change.

Panel: Aboriginal critiques of settler colonial epistemological orders.
Appearing alongside Jeanine Leane, and Barry Corr.

Abstract: For Aboriginal people living on the stolen lands of so-called Australia, the epistemological and axiological orders of settler-colonialism are invasive social forms naturalised by their maintenance in dominant discursive practices and institutions. While generative and liberatory work to decentre and dispose of these forms has been advanced by Indigenous and anticolonial scholars over many decades, universities and other scholarly institutions in the settler-colony have been increasingly shifting towards a rhetoric of decolonisation and Indigenisation that seeks to commodify cultural knowledges, as opposed to transforming systems of oppression and dominance. Aboriginal scholar-practitioners working within or beyond settler-colonial institutions today must now navigate both the erasure and exclusion of culturally informed practices in favour of dominant modes of the colony, and the elite capture of these knowledges by way of settler-moves-to-innocence or the logic of elimination. In this panel three Aboriginal scholar-practitioners navigate these closures to explore the liberatory possibilities of diverse modes of discursive resistance and refusal that are premised on the inverted authorial gaze, the subversive deconstruction of the master’s tools, and alternate, non-extractive creative epistemologies.

Bio: Evelyn Araluen is a Goorie and Koori poet, researcher and co-editor of Overland Literary Journal. Her Stella-prize winning poetry collection DROPBEAR was published by UQP in 2021. She lectures in Literature and Creative Writing at Deakin University.

Panel: Literature and Technology: ALS Convention Panel 1
Appearing alongside Chris Fleming and Christian R. Gelder.

Paper: Stupid Human Tricks: Artificial Intelligence, Irony, and the Distribution of Ignorance

Abstract: The paper begins with Friedrich Nietzsche’s suggestion, in a frequently cited passage from Beyond Good and Evil, that the human ‘will to knowledge’ is founded on a more fundamental, more pervasive, more primordial ‘will to ignorance’, and that all acts of knowing are conditioned by an inexpungible experience of the unknown. In particular, I maintain that the social bond and human interaction in general paradoxically presuppose our mutual ignorance of one another, or a secrecy that holds us together precisely insofar as it holds us apart. I explore this set of claims through readings of a number of literary texts – notably Shakespeare’s Othello, Edgar Alan Poe’s ‘The Purloined Letter’, and George Eliot’s ‘The Lifted Veil’ – and ask what it might imply for artificial intelligence, machine learning, and what the media theorists Orit Halpern and Robert Mitchell have recently dubbed ‘the smartness mandate’. If smartness is the normative horizon of contemporary technological invention, will machines ever replicate human experience, and especially language, an essential and affirmative condition of which, I conclude, is not smartness but stupidity.

Bio: Charles Barbour is Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and a School-based member of the Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. His research spans contemporary political theory, philosophies of technology, and the intellectual history of the nineteenth century, with a special emphasis on the young Karl Marx and his contemporaries.

Paper: Phenomenology and Magic Realism

Abstact: In any discussion of literature’s ability to resist systems of order, magical realism presents itself as a paragon of the reworking of meaning within the dominant (usually colonial) power. Significant scholarship has grappled with how this genre is able to subvert the dominant ideologies, however it is often framed within genre theory and focusses on literary technique, tone or content. A missing piece of the magical realist reordering process comes from its neolist, Roh and his association with Husserl and Heidegger’s phenomenological thought (Zamora et al., 1995). This research examines three essential magical realist texts through the lens of phenomenology’s epoche: Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, Süskind’s Perfume and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children in order to demonstrate the very real application of epoche in the construction and interpretation of magical realist texts due to its ability to subvert dominant world orders by simply refusing to operate within their meaning making systems.

Zamora, L. P., & Faris, W. B. (Eds.). (1995). Magical realism: Theory, history, community. Duke University Press.

Bio: Elizabeth Blackwood is an associate lecturer at Excelsia College where she works with creative artists across music, drama and screen production. Coming from a multi-disciplinary background, she is currently undertaking a practice-based PhD in magical realism, exploring magical realism’s use as a tool for subversion in feminist discourse, specifically resisting patriarchal philosophies of matrescence. Previous publications have focused on creative arts pedagogy.

Paper: Living a queer death: Queer mentorship and the art of failure in The Song of Achilles (2011) and Hades (2020).
Co-authored by Fiona Wilkes.

Abstract: The Song of Achilles and Hades are both fictional revisions that draw from Greek myths to expand upon the relationship between Achilles and Patroclus. We interpret queerness in these texts as chaotic and consider how the choices Achilles and Patroclus make in relation to their queerness can be read as acts of failure. We approach failure as a chaotic means of exploring ‘absurdities and abjections’ and as an ‘art of being differently’ (Ruberg 203) in the existing social order. We argue that to reach a queer ‘other world’ Achilles and Patroclus must first fail as the version of themselves that existed under certain social status quos. We consider the ways in which the form of each text (novel and video game) allow for different explorations of queerness and conclude that both texts celebrate chaos and failure as queer forces which allow for the creation of new forms of living. 

Bio: Heather Blakey is a PhD candidate in literary studies at the University of Western Australia. Her work examines intersections between technology, intimacy and the environment in video games, literature, and virtual worlds. Her writing has been published or is forthcoming in Australian Book Review, Westerly, GamesHub, Revenant, M/C Journal, Bloomsbury Academic, and Osmosis. Heather co-hosts the game studies podcast Meaningful Play. In 2023 she was awarded the Matilda Award for Cultural Excellence for her work on video games. 

Paper: Inez Baranay’s third novel, Pagan

Abstract: Inez Baranay’s third novel, Pagan (1990), is a fictionalised retelling of the Eugene Goossens scandal that explores the organisation and censorship of art through numerous character perspectives. While one reviewer decries its numerous themes: “the struggle of the artist to break free, migration from Europe to Australia, migration from the bush to the city, fear of the unknown, a treatise on witchcraft, growing up, falling in love, getting sex, corrupt cops, liquor licensing laws –to name but a few” (Kelly), all of these themes speak to the ‘chaos’ of life and experience in the 1950s. Thus, the novel can be read as depicting the tensions that exist between these and attempts to categorise and order them. I explore how the accepted cultural construction of order is simply another façade for chaos, where seemingly chaotic characters rely on the ‘order’ of routine and ritual while, so-called agents of order, contribute to chaos.

Bio: Harper Boon is a graduate of the University of Wollongong with English Honours and a Master of Teaching. In addition to teaching secondary English, she is a PhD student at the University of Sydney. Her interests lie in Australian and world literatures, the intersection between secondary and tertiary literature education, and queer pedagogies.

Paper: Gone Bung: Athur Desmond’s Poetry and the Financial Chaos of 1890s Sydney

Abstract: In the twenty-first century Arthur Desmond is better known among scholars of terrorism than scholars of Australian literature. As “Ragnar Redbeard,” Desmond produced one of the foundational texts of social Darwinism and white nationalism, Might is Right, or Survival of the Fittest, first published in 1896, shortly after his arrival in Chicago from Australia. Might is Right has inspired all manner of radicals, ranging from anarchists and libertarians through to Satanists and fascists. What is frequently lost in accounts of Desmond’s influence is his place in Australian literary history as part of the activist community which sprung up around McNamara’s bookshop in Sydney in the 1890s. This paper reinserts Desmond into a cultural milieu which included Henry Lawson, Jack Lang, Billy Hughes, and Alfred Deakin, and examines the ways in which his incendiary verse and prose contributed to the radicalisation of Australian nationalism while sowing chaos in Sydney’s banking industry.

Bio: Wayne Bradshaw is an adjunct research associate and research services officer at James Cook University with degrees in English and Politics. His first book, The Ego Made Manifest: Max Stirner, Egoism, and the Modern Manifesto was published by Bloomsbury in 2023.

Paper: Resource extraction and settler anxiety in contemporary crime fiction

Abstract: In recent years, ‘drought noir’ or rural crime writing has emerged as a consistently popular genre of contemporary Australian fiction. A minor subset of this genre locates its murders in mining towns. In novels including Chris Hammer’s Treasure and Dirt (2021) and Peter Papathanasiou’s The Pit (2023), the spaces, economics, and politics of resource extraction provide the crime plot’s requisite red herrings, suspects and twists. If crime fiction as a genre traditionally requires the resolution of chaos and the re-establishment of order, how do we read these fictions (and their popularity) in this moment of reckoning with mining’s outsized harms and complex failures? This paper reads key examples of this minor trend in Australian crime writing, arguing that it speaks to conflicting settler anxieties about the nation’s economic reliance on resource extraction, and the possibility of a post-extractive future. 

Bio: Meg Brayshaw is the John Rowe Lecturer in Australian Literature at the University of Sydney. Her research interests include the twentieth century Australian novel, and literary engagements with space, environment, and climate. She is beginning a new project tentatively titled ‘Resource extraction, settler colonial spatial imaginaries and the development of the Australian novel’. At Sydney University Press, she is academic editor of the Sydney Studies in Australian Literature series.

Paper: Diasporic memoir and translocal histories of war and gendered violence: Amani Haydar’s The Mother Wound

Abstract: Amina Haydar’s memoir The Mother Wound (2021) is a coming-of age Arab feminist story which combines personalised narrative of the diasporic family with a deconstructive legal analysis of the gendered ethno-racialised victim. Haydar deploys of the genre of memoir to create a hybrid and transformative space between personal and public memory in which she commemorates her occluded maternal heritage and a transgenerational history of war and lethal gendered violence. Jumana Bayeh argues that Arab-Australian literature has been overlooked in the field of Australian literary studies. This paper is positioned as a corrective to this neglect. It examines the subject positions that authorise the memoirist and considers the stakes and risks in the disclosure of trauma in diapsoric memoir. It argues that The Mother Wound serves to open a dialogue, within the literary field, between cultures, histories and political sensibilities which challenges the normative order of officially sanctioned and regulated multiculturalism (Nikro).

Bio: Anne Brewster is an Honorary Associate Professor at UNSW. Her research interests include Australian Indigenous literatures, minoritised women’s literatures, and critical race and whiteness studies. Her books include Giving This Country a Memory: Contemporary Aboriginal Voices of Australia, (2015), Reading Aboriginal Women’s Autobiography (1995, 2015), and (with Sue Kossew) Rethinking the Victim: Gender, Violence and Contemporary Australian Women’s Writing. She is currently working on a project (with Sue Kossew) examining Australian women writing about war. She is the series editor for Australian Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives Peter Lang Ltd. 

Panel: The story of John Hughes’ plagiarism.
Facilitator, appearing alongside Richard Cooke, Sam Lieblich, Emmett Stinson, and Anna Verney.

Bio: Dr Lachlan Brown has investigated over 2,000 cases of academic misconduct for Charles Sturt University, where he is a Senior Lecturer in English and an Academic Integrity Officer. He is the author of two books of poetry and has judged a number of poetry prizes including the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, and the Blake Poetry Prize. Lachlan has been the recipient of the Newcastle Poetry prize and has been shortlisted for other poetry prizes including the Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize and the Blake Poetry Prize. In 2021 Lachlan wrote a biographical poem about a solicitor from Wagga Wagga who was part of a team pursuing J.K. Rowling for plagiarism in London’s High Court. 

Paper: “Like Animals”: Environmental and Animal Ethics in the Indigenous Science Fiction of Claire G. Coleman

Abstract: In response to the continuing chaos caused by climate change, organisations such as the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have increasingly advocated for a move away from animal farming. Vegetarianism is also an almost invariable—and often socially influential—aspect of idealised societies portrayed throughout science fiction and utopian literature until the 1970s. Since then, however, utopian authors have almost exclusively endorsed meat-intensive hunter-gathering arrangements, often inspired by idealisations of Native Americans and other Indigenous cultures. Yet, science fiction and utopian literature by Indigenous authors themselves remains extremely underexamined. This paper contributes addressing that gap by analysing the works of Aboriginal Australian author Claire G. Coleman’s celebrated 2017 novel Terra Nullius and her ongoing engagements with ecology, food scarcity, nonhuman animals and environmental ethics.

Bio: Joshua Bulleid is an affiliate of Melbourne’s Monash University, whose work largely focuses on engagements with animal and environmental ethics in utopian and science fiction literature. His monograph Vegetarianism and Science Fiction: A History of Utopian and Animal Ethics was published in 2023 as part of Palgrave Macmillan’s Studies in Animals and Literature series. His work also appears in the edited collections Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction (2020) and The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies (2022), as well as the field-defining science fiction journals Extrapolation and Science Fiction Studies.

Paper: Is there is a literature of chaos or a literature of order

Abstract: The conference theme begs the question whether there is a literature of chaos or a literature of order. This paper addresses that question through the issue of form and a consideration of absurdism and other kinds of literary experiment. It references the pedagogy of the Creative Writing workshop and its mobilisation of constraints and freedom. Additionally, it explores ‘Chaos order’ through practice-led research, in the shape of a prose poem sequence written with an enveloping structure, but with highly free-associative content. That content explores Chaos Theory terminology, as well as ekphrastic responses to exhibitions of ceramics, basketry, textiles and printmaking. As a hybrid, is the prose poem reflective of chaos or order? The poem itself seeks an invigoration of vocabulary and attempts to capture the multimedia exposure of the everyday, and an example of the implicit relationship between chaos and order in the experience of writing. 

Bio: Owen Bullock’s latest poetry collection is Pancakes for Neptune (Recent Work Press, 2023), following three previous poetry titles, five books of haiku, a bilingual edition of tanka and a novella. His research interests include creative arts and wellbeing; haikai literature; poetry and process; semiotics and poetry; prose poetry, and collaboration. His scholarly work has appeared in Antipodes, Australian and New Zealand Journal of Arts Therapy, Axon, Journal of New Zealand Literature, Ka Mate Ka Ora, New Writing, Qualitative Inquiry, Social Alternatives, TEXT and Westerly. He is Discipline Lead for Creative Writing and Literary Studies at the University of Canberra. https://poetry-in-process.com/ @OwenTrail

Panel: The story of John Hughes’ plagiarism.
Appearing alongside Lachlan Brown, and Emmett Stinson.

Paper: The Chaos and Order in Paul Beatty’s Hokum: An Anthology of African-American Humor

Abstract: Paul Beatty’s edited anthology on African American humour, Hokum (2006) celebrates the literary works of Black figures from a wide range of sources. Hokum is an eclectic and exhaustive volume that highlights the different ways in which Black humour is expressed. In this paper I will argue that the ways in which Beatty theorises his role as an editor and the formation of the anthology genre through his open and inclusive selection process resists systems of order. Beatty rejects a ‘traditional’ or ‘academic’ method of editing anthologies by broadening his selection criteria. While Hokum includes the writing of canonical Black authors it is not limited to them. Rather, Hokum reflects a methodology that offers new ways in anthologising literature. Beatty includes selections from well-known yet unliterary figures because as he states in his introduction “some of the funniest writers don’t write.”  Therefore, Beatty’s anthology can be understood as an example of ‘chaotic’ literature, in that it allows for new kinds of creation and new ways of viewing old and ordered forms of genre. 

Bio: I am a PhD candidate at the University of Sydney. I began my research in 2021, working under the supervision of Sarah Gleeson-White. My thesis focuses on the contemporary African American author Paul Beatty. My interests are in all of Beatty’s published works, Black authored satire, and issues surrounding race, identity, and performance. I have a particular interest in Beatty’s lesser known works, specifically Beatty’s published poetry, career as a performance poet, nonfiction writing, and edited volume on Black humour. 

Paper: “It was the end of our life together”: Family Breakage and Repair in the Separation Stories of Aunty Ruth Hegarty
Co-authored by Jessica Gildersleeve and Nycole Prowse.

Abstract: Aunty Ruth Hegarty’s award-winning memoir, Is That You, Ruthie? (1999), is the author’s testimony of the extensive damage caused by the sanctioned removal and control of First Nations families under the Australian government’s policy of ‘protection’. Hegarty’s memoir, which can be read as a separation narrative, is an attempt to impose order and structure on the chaos and trauma that she endured as a child who was forcibly removed from family and Country, and interned in the dormitory system at Cherbourg mission. At the same time, Hegarty dismantles the colonial invention of native chaos and institutional order as she recounts, with characteristic humour, the ordinary, everyday ways that the dormitory girls engaged in counter-narratives of repair, resistance, and cultural renegotiation. Similarly, in Leah Purcell’s stage adaptation (2023) of the same name, Purcell combines storytelling with archival material to bridge the theatrical and historical worlds of the play and to invoke the audience’s obligation to bear witness. As a result, both Hegarty and Purcell remediate colonial ideas of chaos and order in a counter-discourse of memory and truth that questions what can and cannot be mended.

Bio: Kate Cantrell is a Senior Lecturer in Writing, Editing, and Publishing at the University of Southern Queensland. Her research specialisation is contemporary representations of trauma in Australian literature and media, and narrative depictions of illness, immobility, and displacement, particularly in works of children’s and young adult literature. Her short stories, creative non-fiction, and poetry appear in highly-esteemed magazines and journals, such as Overland, Meanjin, and Westerly, among others.

Panel: Circulation, Time and Refusals of Order in Literary Forms
Appearing alongside Elena Gomez.

Paper: Whose Green Future? Ecofiction, Everywhen, and Tropical Time

Abstract: How does supposedly ecologically-minded fiction imagine alternative ways of surviving in the future? With what kind of gaze do such stories look upon regions most heavily impacted by climate catastrophe, such as the tropics, or regions whose climate precarity is a result of the violence of colonisation? I explore the relationship of temporality with these fictions of the future, given the propensity of a Temperate gaze to still trap these regions in anachronism.

Here, I examine short stories from the science fiction anthology Ecopunk!: Spectacular Tales of Radical Futures, edited by Liz Grzyb and Cat Sparks, published in 2017. How do the contributors of the Ecopunk! anthology distill their ideas on what exactly constitutes a “radical” future through the short stories included therein, and how is this supposed radicality potentially undermined by colonial undercurrents in the stories? And how do other contemporary narratives, such as those seen in This All Come Back Now: An anthology of First Nations speculative fiction, edited by Mykaela Saunders, and Collisions: A Liminal Anthology, respond to these blindspots in speculative fiction.

Bio: Erika M. Carreon co-founded and co-edited Plural Online Journal. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from De La Salle University-Manila, where she taught with the Literature Department from 2010 to 2018. Her literary works have appeared in High Chair, Kritika Kultura, Philippines Free Press, and Sigwa: Climate Fiction from the Philippines (forthcoming from the Polytechnic University of the Philippines Press). She is currently studying for a PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Melbourne.

Paper: Polarities of the Australian Avant-Gardes
Appearing alongside Kate Lilley and Michael Farrell.

Bio: A.J. Carruthers is a poet/critic, author of Literary History and Avant-Garde Poetics in the Antipodes: Languages of Invention (Edinburgh University Press, 2024), Notational Experiments in North American Long Poems: Stave Sightings (Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), Axis Book 1: ‘Areal,’ (Vagabond 2014), Axis Book 2 (Vagabond 2019), Axis Z Book 3 (Cordite, 2023), and a sound poem Consonata (Cordite, 2019). Carruthers received the Cy Twombly Award for Poetry in 2024 from the Foundation of Contemporary Arts. Carruthers has taught at SUIBE (Shanghai) as Lecturer, Nanjing University, as Associate Professor, and is currently a Visiting Fellow at ANU (Australian National University).

Panel: Can the law provide order in an industry of chaos? Authors’ perception of authorship and ownership and the influence of AI
Appearing alongside Sarah Hook, Laura E. Goodin, and Omar Sakr.

Event: ASAL Prizes and Barry Andrews Address

Bio: Felicity Castagna has published four novels for adults and young adults including her most recent book, Girls In Boys’ Cars, which won the Victorian and Queensland Premier’s Literary Awards, was adapted to stage by Priscilla Jackman for The National Theatre of Parramatta and will soon become a major film. Her previous novel, No More Boats was a finalist in the 2018 Miles Franklin Literary Awards and her novel The Incredible Here and Now received The Prime Minister’s Award as well as The IBBY. She also writes large-scale work and collaborates with artists across a number of different fields. She recently wrote the work ‘What Is The City But The People’ for The Sydney Opera House and her work ‘Encounter’, a collaboration with over sixty dancers and musicians premiered at The Sydney Festival and is still touring. She publishes essays on home, suburbia, place and Australian literature. Her creative non-fiction and critical responses to literature, suburbia and home are published both here and internationally on platforms such as The Sydney Review of Books, Electric Literature, LitHub and ABC radio and television. She is currently a lecturer in Creative Writing with The Writing and Society Research Centre, Western Sydney University.

Paper: Tackling Faith and Identity: Greg Egan’s “Oceanic” as a SF Bildungsroman

Abstract: Known as science fiction’s greatest mystery man, Greg Egan, an Australian SF writer based in Perth, does not attend conventions or appear in public. There are no photographs of Egan on the internet, which makes scholars more interested in him and his works. The novella “Oceanic” by Egan was first published in the August 1998 issue of Asimov’s Science Fiction and recently was re-published in ˆ in 2019 in the US. Though often categorized as science fiction, “Oceanic” embodies features of a bildungsroman. This essay interprets how Martin, the posthuman protagonist of “Oceanic”, finds his way to maturity through the mist of chaos and ambiguity in his life. Through the analysis of Martin’s self-development route, this essay also tries to uncover how Egan views religion, gender and identity politics. 

Bio: Beibei Chen, Ph.D in English, graduated from UNSW and now works as a lecturer in the department of English in East China Normal University. Her research interests include Australian literature, Chinese diasporic literature, cultural studies and memory studies. She has published academic papers on many literary journals such as Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Westerly, and Australian Cultural Studies. She is also a poet and she has published more than 80 poems in Chinese and in English. Beibei Chen also works as a part-time translator and her translation has been published by Routledge and other publishers. 

Paper: Order/ Disorder: The Transformation of Frankenstein’s Female Monster Imagery in the Movie Poor Things

Abstract: Within the grand tide of the French Revolution, the Female Gothic emerged as a significant literary movement throughout the nineteenth century. “Female Gothic” originally referred to Gothic works by female novelists since the eighteenth century, later symbolizing women’s anxieties within patriarchal society. The female monster is a characteristic of Female Gothic literature, with its archetype often imbued with themes of violence and hysteria, which undoubtedly represent chaos and disorder. However, in Poor Things, directed by Yorgos Lanthimos in 2023, as the female monster Bella becomes more human-like and orderly, she is considered the evil monster. Against this backdrop, I argue that the image of the female monster has shifted from subverting phallocentric society to representing self-identity.

Bio: Chih Yi Cheng is a second-year MA student in English literature at National Chengchi University, Taiwan. Her ongoing research project aims to inspect the intermediality between fiction and games and to explore the cultural transfer from Europe to Asia. Chih Yi’s past research has focus on gothic studies, nineteenth century novels and popular literature. Moreover, she’s currently interested in studying psychoanalysis.

Paper: Oliver Twist’s Adoptive Parents: ‘Upon Liking’

Abstract: From the Victorian parish system, apprenticeships and street gangs to middle class relatives and friends of family, Oliver Twist includes a number of informal and quasi-adoptive parents/groups. These groups are clearly demarcated by their class/the class they serve and each have particular reasons for why they adopt. Exploring Oliver’s progress through the parish system of poor relief (baby farm, workhouse, apprenticeship) and even his time under the care of Fagin, this paper highlights a particularly utilitarian ideal of adoption among lower class adopters. Comparatively, when under the care of his father’s middle class friend Mr Brownlow and separately under the care of his aunt, Rose; the purpose of his adoption is the adopters’ own emotional satisfaction. These class distinctions (only further exemplified by Rose’s own experiences of adoption) for why someone adopts depict a general anxiety of the time both for anti-poor law reformists and Dickens himself. These persons largely depicted (in narrative and public materials) the middle class as the best if not the only suitable choice for ‘caring’ adoption while lower class and public systems instead symbolised utilitarian exploitation or abuse of vulnerable orphans.

Bio: Daniel Colley is a postgraduate student at WSU having recently completed his Masters of Research and looking to begin his Doctorate of Creative Arts in 2025. His MRes thesis explores the nature vs nurture debate embedded within Victorian fiction that includes the ‘adoption triad’ (adoptee, birth parents, adoptive parents); in particular Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens and Daniel Deronda by George Eliot. Daniel is also an English/History secondary teacher, having previously completed his secondary teaching masters at WSU in 2017, and presently working in the Campbelltown/Macarthur area. He hopes to use his eventual doctorate to lecture and tutor at universities, merging his passions of literature, the creative arts and teaching but at a tertiary level.

Panel: The absolutism of technology and the cybernetic myth.
Appearing alongside Chris Danta and Matthew Holt.

Paper: CyberGaia and the promise of technological transcendence.

Abstract: The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) has been met with immense optimism in its potential to revolutionize industry and deep pessimism in its potential to trigger social chaos or even automated Armageddon. Utopian hopes for social order and radical renewal compete with dystopian anxieties over machine generated social chaos and disintegration, recapitulating a history of responses to technology that arises in modern times from the hidden legacy of myth in cybernetics. In this paper, I frame such collective responses—which restate the magical promise of machines to either liberate us from drudgery or enslave us to our own inventions—with Hans Blumenberg’s theory of the functional role of myth and metaphor to orient the finite subject in a hostile universe. Myth and its function of keeping the absolutist threat of nature at bay is not invalidated by reason in scientific modernity. Rather, as the ‘absolutism of reality’ that threatened the human control of the conditions of existence is succeeded by the ‘absolutism of technology,’ the cybernetic myths of the cyborg, the singularity, and CyberGaia hold out the promise of technological transcendence, a transformed consciousness born in the union of technology and nature in a single organic system or network. I compare CyberGaia as a work of myth to literary examples of work on myth in the context of Blumenberg’s scepticism of utopian politics. Technogaianism is oriented to sustainable development, but its guiding image of a biosphere that seamlessly transfers the emotional-spiritual energies of environmental activism into ‘sustainable closed loop technological systems’ (Collins, ‘CyberGaia’) arguably requires a special faith in the transformative power of intelligence. The political expectations raised on this faith are likely to be disappointed insofar as they disregard the ‘morbid tempo’ of modernity (Kolakowski) in which technology speeds up the processes that drive events to conflict. The downgrading of such hopes in Blumenberg emerges from his minimalist anthropology, in which ‘the “naked truth” is not what life can live with’ (Work on Myth).   

Bio: Christopher Conti is Senior Lecturer of Literary Studies at Western Sydney University and member of the Writing and Society Research Centre. His current research on metaphysical horror explores the intersections between modernist literature, critical theory, theology, and philosophical anthropology with special reference to Hans Blumenberg and Leszek Kolakowski. He is the author of Proofs: 104 short stories (Puncher & Wattmann, 2012).

Panel: The story of John Hughes’ plagiarism.
Appearing alongside Lachlan Brown, Sam Lieblich, Emmett Stinson, and Anna Verney.

Richard Cooke is a multi-award winning author, reporter and screenwriter. The author of two books, he is the former US correspondent and current contributing editor to the The Monthly magazine, the former sports editor of The Saturday Paper, and the former arts editor of Time Out Sydney. For a time he edited The Chaser newspaper. He has been published by many others, including the Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, WIRED and the Paris Review. In 2018 he won the Mumbrella Publish Award Columnist of the Year award, and was a finalist for the Walkley-Pascall Award for arts criticism. In 2023 he won the 2023 June Andrews Award for Arts Journalism in the mid-year Walkley Awards, and the Walkley Award for Feature Writing Long (Over 4000 Words). 

Bio: Richard Cooke is a multi-award winning author, reporter and screenwriter. The author of two books, he is the former US correspondent and current contributing editor to the The Monthly magazine, the former sports editor of The Saturday Paper, and the former arts editor of Time Out Sydney. For a time he edited The Chaser newspaper. He has been published by many others, including the Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, The New Republic, WIRED and the Paris Review. In 2018 he won the Mumbrella Publish Award Columnist of the Year award, and was a finalist for the Walkley-Pascall Award for arts criticism. In 2023 he won the 2023 June Andrews Award for Arts Journalism in the mid-year Walkley Awards, and the Walkley Award for Feature Writing Long (Over 4000 Words). 

Paper: Nuclear Destruction in First Nations and Settler Australian Writing

Abstract:

that bomb. the torture of red sand turning green
the anguish of earth turned to glass
did you hear it?
— Ali Cobby Eckermann, ‘Thunder raining poison’ (2016)

In 1955, Dymphna Cusack’s play, Pacific Paradise, written as a response to atomic testing conducted by the USA in Bikini Atoll, was first staged at the Waterside Workers Theatre in Sydney. The play went on to be performed in Japan, the USSR, North Korea, the United Kingdom and Cuba. In 2016, Yankunytjatjara/Kokatha writer Ali Cobby Eckermann published ‘Thunder raining poison’, a poem exploring the devastation caused by British atomic testing on Maralinga Tjarutja Country between 1956 and 1963. Eckermann describes the bomb as ‘the torture of red sand turning green / the anguish of earth turned to glass’, concluding the poem with a statement of ongoing connection to Country: ‘it’s part of us. we love it. poisoned and all’.

As these two examples show, events of nuclear destruction loom large in the Australian literary imagination, from the Cold War period to the present. Whether responding to international, regional or local nuclear events, settler Australian and First Nations writers have engaged creatively with nuclear destruction in works of fiction, poetry and drama. In mapping some of these responses, this paper will illuminate both the transnational and intensely local nature of Australian writing and explore the question of what literature is able to do in relation to nuclear chaos. 

Bio: Dr Melinda Cooper is the author of Middlebrow Modernism: Eleanor Dark’s Interwar Fiction (Sydney University Press, 2022), for which she received the ASAL Alvie Egan Award and the AUHE Prize for Literary Scholarship in 2023. Melinda has taught in the field of Australian Literature at the University of Sydney, where she completed her PhD in 2019. 

Panel: Aboriginal critiques of settler colonial epistemological orders.
Appearing alongside Jeanine Leane, and Evelyn Araluen.

Abstract: For Aboriginal people living on the stolen lands of so-called Australia, the epistemological and axiological orders of settler-colonialism are invasive social forms naturalised by their maintenance in dominant discursive practices and institutions. While generative and liberatory work to decentre and dispose of these forms has been advanced by Indigenous and anticolonial scholars over many decades, universities and other scholarly institutions in the settler-colony have been increasingly shifting towards a rhetoric of decolonisation and Indigenisation that seeks to commodify cultural knowledges, as opposed to transforming systems of oppression and dominance. Aboriginal scholar-practitioners working within or beyond settler-colonial institutions today must now navigate both the erasure and exclusion of culturally informed practices in favour of dominant modes of the colony, and the elite capture of these knowledges by way of settler-moves-to-innocence or the logic of elimination. In this panel three Aboriginal scholar-practitioners navigate these closures to explore the liberatory possibilities of diverse modes of discursive resistance and refusal that are premised on the inverted authorial gaze, the subversive deconstruction of the master’s tools, and alternate, non-extractive creative epistemologies.

Bio: Barry Corr lives in the Hawkesbury and writes about the ways in which the Hawkesbury’s Frontier War is remembered, or not remembered. His writings on Aboriginal perspectives of settler-coloniality have been published in Meanjin, Overland and Honi Soit. His essay “Knowing Even as We Are Known” is published in Against Disappearance: Essays on Memory. Pondering the Abyss, his historical critique of settler-colonial languages and narratives of the invasion and settlement of the Hawkesbury region, will be published by NewSouth Publishing in 2025. 

Paper: Beneath the Wings of Giants: Phoenix journal

Abstract: For a brief moment in time during the early 1940s, the city of Adelaide was the literary capital of Australia, having given rise to two influential movements that would reshape Australian literature and culture: the Jindyworobak’s and the Angry Penguins. The largely unacknowledged origin of both movements lies in the little-known literary journal of a precocious undergraduate body at the University of Adelaide. Out of the ashes of the Great Depression, the parochial conservatism of old money, soil erosion crises and the radical ‘isms’ sweeping the globe, Phoenix journal would rise and then fall, only for the titanic forces it birthed to rise again and alter the course of Australian culture forever. 

Bio: Dr Samuel J. Cox is an early career researcher at the University of Adelaide. His PhD thesis, Dust Country: Stories from a Shifting Land utilised ecocritical and ecomaterialist approaches to trace the movement of dust across Australian writing. He won ASAL’s A.D. Hope Prize in 2022, and ALS’s PhD Essay Prize, the University of Adelaide’s Heather Kerr Prize and the Bundey Prize for English Verse in 2023. His work has appeared in JASAL, ALS, Westerly, Mascara Literary Review, Motifs and the Saltbush Review. 

Paper: George Eliot and the Dialectics of a Chaotic Gendered Experience

Abstract: This paper examines the complexities of point of view in relation to questions of gender in the novels of George Eliot. Eliot pushed against the established formal qualities of the realist novel in an attempt to convey nuanced and varied perspectives, whilst at the same time using the confines of realism to make sense of her own conflicted experience of sex and gender. Focusing especially on the novels Middlemarch and Romola, this paper will analyse how Eliot attempts to make order out of the chaos of her own identity and experience within the novel form through experimentation with character and language, and how this experimentation caused her to push the novel form away from the ordered constructs of realism and towards the more chaotic modernist style.

Bio: Phoebe Croxford is completing a Master of Research at Western Sydney University. Her research is on the role of George Eliot in the development of the novel, specifically examining how Eliot’s gendered experiences influenced her innovation with form, positioning her as a precursor to the modernist novelists. Once she has completed the Master of Research, Phoebe hopes to continue her study at Western Sydney with a PhD.

Paper: Should writing constraints be visible to the reader?

Abstract: Practitioners of constrained writing consciously devise and adopt explicit, precisely formulated writing rules; a classic case is Georges Perec’s novel ‘A Void’, written without using the letter E. Some scholars and practitioners have argued that such rules ought to be visible: that the reader should be able to see what the writer is doing. I argue that while visibility advances some valid literary aims, it hinders others; and that some constrained writers might therefore prefer their rules to be difficult (or even impossible) to spot.

Bio: John Cusbert is a doctoral candidate at Western Sydney University. He uses constrained writing in his fiction.

Panel: The absolutism of technology and the cybernetic myth.
Appearing alongside Chris Conti and Matthew Holt.

Paper: Fabulous Devourment in Philip K. Dick.

Abstract: According to Philip K. Dick: “The ultimate in paranoia is not when everyone is against you but when everything is against you. Instead of ‘My boss is plotting against me,’ it would be ‘My boss’s phone is plotting against me.’” Dick often introduces chaos into his fiction by turning objects against their human users. In his 1953 story “Colony,” a team of surveyors on Planet Blue discover to their horror that a nonhuman organic lifeform on the planet is impersonating humanmade objects such as microscopes, belts, cars and spaceships in order to devour the human colonizers. Dick constantly describes technological objects camouflaging themselves by impersonating human or animal form (“Second Variety,” Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?). In Ubik (1969), technologies gain a sense of agency when they suddenly start to devolve into earlier historical versions of themselves. Underpinning Dick’s fiction, I argue, is the fantasy of apparently inert objects becoming animate and devouring the human subject. We can trace the origin of this fantasy to Dick’s very first science fiction story, “Beyond Lies the Wub” (1952). This story tells of how the human character Captain Franco kills and eats a highly intelligent pig-like creature from the planet Mars called the Wub, only then to be possessed by this creature. Here, then, is the truly Dickian fantasy of the human colonizer being devoured by the apparently inert object it colonizes/devours.  

Bio: Chris Danta is a professor of literature and an ARC Future Fellow in the School of Cybernetics at the Australia National University. His research operates at the intersection of literary theory, philosophy, science and theology. He is the author of Literature Suspends Death: Sacrifice and Storytelling in Kierkegaard, Kafka and Blanchot (Bloomsbury, 2011) and Animal Fables after Darwin: Literature, Speciesism and Metaphor (Cambridge UP, 2018).

Panel: Discipline and Undiscipline in the Underworld
Appearing alongside Monique Rooney and Joseph Steinberg.

Paper: Discipline and Undiscipline in the Underworld

Abstract: John Rechy’s bestselling novel City of Night (1963) helped set the co-ordinates for a series  of 1960s novels and films in which America’s urban queer underworld metaphorises American anomie. “Anarchy” is one of Rechy’s favourite descriptors of this world. Yet the chaotic undiscipline implied by this term is at odds with City’s preoccupation with the conventions and taxonomies of queer life. City both complements and contrasts with the sociology of deviancy—along with fiction, one of the key discourses through which homosexuality was made culturally visible during the 1960s. For the sociology of deviancy, an emphasis on the disciplining norms of the gay world helped consolidate the disciplinarity of this academic sub-field.  In this paper, I bring Rechy into dialogue with sociological scholarship to consider what was at stake for 1960s American culture in representations of queer subcultural life as alternatively or simultaneously disciplined and undisciplined.

Bio: Guy Davidson is Associate Professor of English Literatures at the University of Wollongong. He is the author of Queer Commodities: Contemporary US Fiction, Consumer Capitalism, and Gay and Lesbian Subcultures (2012) and Categorically Famous: Literary Celebrity and Sexual Liberation in 1960s America. His current research focuses on the idea of the underground in postwar American literature and culture.

Paper: Chaos and Control—representing gender in gender diverse picturebooks

Abstract: In recent years there has been increased focus on transgender children in the Australian media, not all of it uniformly positive. In this context, the growing number of picturebooks featuring trans and gender diverse children has the potential to be an important resource for gender diverse children and their parents, as well as for children more generally. The increased publication of gender diverse picturebooks has been strongly motivated by a social justice agenda, contesting dominant ideologies by challenging cultural expectations around gender and facilitating social change.  As a consequence, many gender diverse picturebooks have been seen as controversial and dangerous for children, particularly by conservative commentators. 

Contemporary gender diverse picture books provide a rich domain for analysis of visual and verbal representations of gender. Using multimodal discourse analysis (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2006; Painter, Martin, & Unsworth, 2013), this paper explores how English language gender diverse picture books published in the last decade represent gender.  The paper argues that the last decade has seen an increase in more diverse, shifting and individualised representations of gender and that gender identity itself is increasingly represented as self-determined rather than socially determined. Tension is frequently played out in the books between the social practices or performance of gender and the construction of gender as ‘being’: the truth of who you really are.

Bio: Di Dickenson teaches in the English, Cultural and Social Analysis, and Childhood Studies majors in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University. Di’s interests include childhood studies, gender identity and image-text relations in picturebooks.  Di’s current research uses multimodal discourse analysis to explore childhood, gender and identity in gender diverse picturebooks.

Paper: Chaos in conformity: reading 20^th century biographical anthologies for girls

Abstract: Biography for girls has been a popular subgenre of children’s literature for as long as books have been written for children. From girls’ own adventure stories; within annuals; through historical tales; to stories of inspirational women from the margins; biographical anthologies for girls were highly visible in Australia in the mid-20th century. Read retrospectively, these (often highly amusing) texts offer potent indications of what was considered important for girl readers to see and know at the time. But these texts also reveal the beginnings of biography becoming a more rebellious genre, one that seeks to offer a diverse and developing set of social roles for young women. In this paper I focus on a small selection of mid-20th century biographical anthologies for girls that I found during a fellowship in the Nolan Collection of Children’s Literature (ACU, Melbourne). What vision of girlhood do these books promote and what are the implications of these representations for biography studies and beyond?”

Bio: Kate Douglas is a Professor of English at Flinders University. She researches and teaches contemporary modes of life storying with a particular interest in children’s narratives and narratives of childhood. Her latest book is Children and Biography: Reading and Writing Life Stories (Bloomsbury, 2022). Kate is the co-convenor of the Life Narrative Lab, an executive member of the International Autobiography Association (IABA), and the convenor of IABA Asia-Pacific.

Paper: Richard III

Abstract: In Richard III, Shakespeare offers the quintessential example of maniacal, moustache-twirling villainy.  In his histrionically distorted portrait of a King who rises to power through audacious treachery, Shakespeare charms his audience with the antics of a gleeful sociopath whose only motivation appears to the wholesale desecration of the English monarchy.  But it is through this seductive immolation of the social order that Shakespeare pulls equally masterful act of deception: luring his audience into yearning for the restoration of the very structures they have just delighted in seeing torn down.

Bio: Colin Dray is a lecturer in Literature at Campion College of the Liberal Arts and an author of fiction. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Sydney (2009), where his thesis offered an interdisciplinary study exploring the intersections of literature and philosophy in the exquisite, playful poetry of Gwen Harwood.  Examples of his literary criticism have been published in Australian Literary Studies and Antipodes, and his first novel, Sign, was published through Allen & Unwin. 

Paper: Poetically Man Fells: Les Murray and the Dialectics of Settlement

Abstract: The large poetic oeuvre and essayistic writing produced by Les Murray over his long career inarguably constitute one of the monuments of Australian settlement. They also, this paper will argue, articulate with a singular rhetorical force the one of the constitutive premises of colonialism’s conceptual horizon. This is, as Simon During has recently observed, a co-extensivity between the conception of land as infinitely alienable and that of history as ineluctably progressive. As Andrew McCann and others have observed, in early Australian colonial poetry this collocation seeds a particular colonial tense of ‘proleptic retrospectivity’ through which the coming industrial metropolis is anticipated and the extinction of Aboriginal peoples ‘mourned’ with equivalent inevitability, thereby coding a political violence as a natural one.

This paper elaborates and argues the formulation in Murray’s deliberately historical poetics of a corresponding temporal manoeuvre in which the poet’s own familial and formal antecedents are re-inscribed through a tense of ‘retrospective proleptivity.’ Thereby, the closure of what Rifkin calls settler-time is rendered complete, and the strongest literary claim to possession of the Australian continent articulated. As he himself acknowledged however, Murray was finally more of a poet than anything else, including a colonist, and this paper concludes that his own project can be dialectically read to contain the generative contradictions of its own undoing, anticipating the critiques of Aboriginal poets such as Evelyn Araluen and Alison Whittaker. 

Bio: Jonathan Dunk is a Lecturer in Writing and Literature at Deakin University, and co-editor of Overland Literary Journal. He is a widely published critic and poet, and the recipient of the AD Hope prize and the Australia Council’s Dal Stivens award.

Paper: Withdrawing with Style from the Chaos (Theory)

Abstract:

“Let us withdraw with style from the chaos.”  (Stoppard, Tom. Lord Malquist and Mr Moon. 2005)

Can chaos theory be adapted to productively express, explain, or expound literary work?  An early attempt was N. Katherine Hayles’ Chaos Bound: Orderly Disorder in Contemporary Literature and Science (1990), followed by others including William W. Demastes’ Theatre of Chaos: Beyond Absurdism, into Orderly Disorder (1998), and Michael Patrick Gillespie’s The Aesthetics of Chaos: Nonlinear Thinking and Contemporary Literary Criticism (2003). Using examples from Tom Stoppard’s signature play about chaos theory, Arcadia (1993), and also from earlier works that contain anxieties about the gaps between social order and personal chaos, this paper will delineate the common components of these and other efforts, exploring why they have not succeeded on their own terms, and arguing that while literature can help us to understand chaos theory, chaos theory has not proven a generative approach to literature. 

Bio: Fergus Edwards is a PhD candidate at the University of Tasmania, examining Tom Stoppard’s plays and Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy of ethics. He holds an MA (Oxon.) in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, and an MA (Open) in English. His work has been published in Philosophy and Literature and Philosophy Now. In 2023, he was awarded an Andrew B. Mellon Fellowship at the University of Texas at Austin, and also received an Australasian Humour Studies Network scholarship. In his spare time he has completed ultramarathons across the Antarctic, Atacama, Gobi, and Sahara Deserts, and once ran non-stop from Athens to Sparta. 

Paper: MATERIALITY, AGENCY AND CHRONOLOGY: ORDERING CHARLES HARPUR AND THE COLONIAL SCENE

Abstract: Colonial Australian writers, neglected since the Bicentenary, have been further relegated by the decolonising movement. Time, empire and geography work against them as ordering, interpretative frames. Triply isolated, they can be tacitly forgotten – or protested as symptoms of oppressive histories. Yet recent book history has challenged their alleged isolation. In fact, those writers, especially from the 1840s, seem to have lived, read and written in an interconnected literary world. A different set of ordering frames, text-critical rather than literary-critical ones, is necessary to capture the phenomenon. For colonial poet Charles Harpur (1813–1868), for instance, materiality, agency and chronology stand out, largely because he was above all a versional and multi-voiced poet, sensitive to occasion. The paper begins with the critical reception of Harpur from the 1940s onwards, which conducted his reputation through consecutive ordering frames, ending with the present text-historical phase where the material realities of his writing life are coming into the open, allowing a surprising, new Harpur to emerge. 

Paper: D. H. LAWRENCE’S TEXT-GAMBLES IN BIRDS,BEASTS AND FLOWERS

Abstract: Written text is, like spoken, always a performed text, performed over time in an agented body and mind, and usually recorded on a material surface. And yet all we have, as readers, to work with normally is the material surface, the printed document. How can we get behind it to understand and better describe the energies that, in reading, we sense – at least, with D. H. Lawrence – to be pulsing through it? How to find structural order in textual disorder? Taking Lawrence at his word by pursuing a thematic or discursive approach to the ideas in his writings usually leads us astray since it overlooks the fundamental dynamic beneath. We need to recognise the Darwin spider in him, the text-gambler, the improviser. The fertile nature of his creative urge – always provisional, located in and propelled, riff-like, by a personal voice or tone or mood – is unmistakeable in the poems of 1920 that would become part of Birds, Beasts and Flowers (1923).

Bio: Paul Eggert is Professor Emeritus at Loyola University Chicago and at the University of New South Wales, Canberra. He edited or co-edited works by Lawrence, Conrad and various Australian authors before writing a trilogy of linked monographs: Securing the Past (2009), Biography of a Book (2013) and The Work and the Reader in Literary Studies (2019). Co-edited with Chris Vening, The Letters of Charles Harpur and his Circle has recently appeared from Sydney University Press. It is an offshoot from the Charles Harpur Critical Archive.

Paper: Parts of Speech and the Problem of Subjectivity

Abstract: Subjectivity is a primary problem in the study of literature. How does a certain arrangement of words create the illusion of a conscious mind? What is the role of the reader in ‘narrativising’ or ‘lyricising’ the text to create this illusion? In this paper, I present a useful approach to the problem of textual subjectivity based on digital methods. Although there are many textual routes to subjectivity, one of the primary routes in English is the first-person pronoun or possessive adjective. Words such as ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘our’ or ‘myself’ invoke or indicate a subject of expression. Using digital methods, we can track which verbs predicate pronouns like ‘we’, and which nouns are qualified by adjectives such as ‘my’. Using this data, we can build up a detailed picture of the kinds, flavours or patterns of subjectivity evoked by different writers. To demonstrate this, I analyse a corpus of Romantic sonnets drawn from my new book.

Bio: Michael Falk is Senior Lecturer in Digital Studies at the University of Melbourne. He holds a PhD in English from the University of Kent. His work considers computation from both an applied and a critical angle. His critical work appears in forums such as Interdisciplinary Science Reviews and Frontiers of Robotics and AI. His applied work in book history and computational literary studies appears in the John Clare Society Journal, JLLC, The Paper Trade in Early Modern Europe (Brill, 2021) and elsewhere. As a member of the wikihistories project, Michael maintains wikkitidy, an R package for Wikipedia Studies, and is a lead author of the Wikihistories Reports. His first book, Romanticism and the Contingent Self: The Challenge of Representation, appears with Palgrave this year.

Paper: The Orient: Tracing Irish Encounters and Perspectives Across Centuries

Abstract: This study explores the historical trajectory of Irish interactions with the Orient spanning previous centuries and the twentieth century. Despite Ireland’s geographical separation from traditional centers of Oriental exploration, Irish individuals have historically engaged with the Orient in various capacities. Utilizing a comprehensive range of historical, literary, and contemporary sources, this investigation aims to elucidate the motives, experiences, and cultural exchanges that have influenced Irish perspectives on the Orient over time. From early medieval voyages driven by trade and religious missions to colonial encounters and academic pursuits of the twentieth century, the research examines the diverse ways in which Irish individuals have engaged with and interpreted the Orient. By analyzing the patterns and shifts in these interactions, the study seeks to enhance our understanding of the complex and evolving relationship between Ireland and the Orient, shedding light on the enduring narratives and cultural exchanges that have shaped their historical connection.

Bio: Hamid Farahmandian is a PhD student in the field of English literature at the Australian National University. His current research focuses on James Joyce and Orientalism, particularly the Middle East and Persia. 

Paper: Polarities of the Australian Avant-Gardes
Appearing alongside Kate Lilley and A.J. Carruthers.

Bio: Michael Farrell has been breaking down Australian poetry and its history for some years. Originally from Bombala, NSW, and based in Melbourne, Michael is linked to Western Sydney University through Giramondo, who have published a raiders guide, open sesame, Cocky’s Joy, I Love Poetry, Family Trees, and most recently, Googlecholia (2022). Writing Australian Unsettlement: Modes of Poetic Invention 1796-1945 was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2015.

Paper: ‘“To Cultivate Our Own”: Ordering the Colony in the Children’s Literature of Louisa Anne Meredith’
Co-authored with Lauren Weber.

Abstract: This paper analyses Louisa Anne Meredith’s use of scientific classification in her books produced for colonial child-readers in nineteenth-century Tasmania, with a particular focus on Some of My Bush Friends in Tasmania (1860), Loved and Lost (1869), and Tasmanian Friends and Foes; Furred, Feathered, and Finned (1880). We argue that Meredith imports the British-colonial apparatus of taxonomy, scientific vocabulary, and botanical illustration to order and make legible a landscape that she perceived as being at once wild and ripe for cultivation. Building on John Plotz’s theorisation of ‘portability’, wherein nineteenth-century Britons collectively invested in a ‘national portable property’ in efforts to ‘stay English’ in ‘Greater Britain’ (2), this paper reads the status of the colonial child in Meredith’s works as the idealised mini-colonialist whose knowledge of the landscape is developed through textual encounter. Such reading habits inculcated, from the earliest stages of development, the understanding that their unruly colonial island might first be brought under the disciplining hand of scientific order on the page, before being cultivated in practice. 

Bio: Sara Fernandes is a lecturer in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne. She specializes in novel studies, with a focus on portability and circulation across Britain, the Caribbean, and the Pacific in the long eighteenth century. Her work has appeared in European Romantic Review, New Literary History, Textual Practice, and Medical History. 

Panel: Chaos and Order: Interdisciplinarity in Science and Humanities
Respondent Professor Chris Fleming with Presenter Professor Bob Hodge

This panel will look at the core theme of this conference, ‘Chaos and Order’, through the frame of interdisciplinarity. The presenter will examine ‘Interdisciplinarity’ as a common thread across the various disciplines united across this Congress, understood in a variety of ways. The presentation will look at interdisciplinarity at two levels: between adjacent disciplines within the Humanities, Literature and Linguistics, and at meta-levels, between Science and Humanities. It will draw illustrations from Homer’s Odyssey, a literary classic it will be argued incorporated wisdom about dealing with a world in chaos. It will develop a model for interdisciplinarity in a field of chaos which it calls ‘binocular interdisciplinarity’. A main part of its purpose then will be to apply this model to the chaos-and-order double as it functions in Scientific forms of ‘chaos theory’ compared to Humanities disciplines and discourses in this Congress. The Respondent will reflect on these themes from a broad perspective in Philosophy, including the philosophy of Science.

Panel: Literature and Technology: ALS Convention Panel 1
Appearing alongside Charles Barbour and Christian R. Gelder.

Paper: Tilting at Windmills: How to do Things with Nerds

Abstract: In 1997, ‘Clippy’ appeared in Microsoft Word. After receiving certain text inputs Clippy might ask ‘It appears you’re writing a letter. Would you like help with that?’ The reaction against Clippy was huge and unrelenting and eventually saw him named by Time Magazine in 2010 as one of the ‘50 Worst Inventions’ in technological history, along with Hair in a Can, DDT, and Agent Orange. And although Clippy officially disappeared in 2003, his spirit – and Bayesian intuitions – live on. So-called ‘intelligent agents’ haunt our world more than ever. But what kind of agents are they, and what kind of intelligence do they offer? In this paper I will raise issues of what it means to have intelligence distributed through systems, and the place literature can and does play in what we think of as intelligence. Literature has always existed in a complex relationship with technology and human intelligence itself. From Cervantes’ Don Quixote on, it has been one kind of ‘input’ into a technological – that is to say, human – culture, reflecting and drawing attention to its limitations, its insanities, and its promises. What might it have to say to us in an era where Clippy has gone, but his questions have become larger, like ‘It appears that you’re trying to write an essay on Don Quixote. Would you like me to do that for you?’

Bio: Chris Fleming is currently Associate Professor in the School of Humanities and Communication Arts and Member of the Writing and Society Research Centre. He has taught and conducted research at numerous universities in Australia and overseas, including the University of New South Wales, Sydney University, the University of Technology, and has been Visiting Fellow in French and Francophone Studies at UCLA and in the School of Romance Languages at Stanford University. He has written widely on issues of culture, philosophy, and religion, has worked as a French translator, and is the author or editor of ten books, including René Girard: Violence and Mimesis (London and New York: Polity, 2004), Modern Conspiracy: The Importance of Being Paranoid (London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2014) (co-authored with Emma A. Jane), and On Drugs (Sydney: Giramondo, 2019). His work has appeared in journals such as Philosophy and Social Criticism, Body & Society, and Modern Drama, he has also written popular pieces for outlets such as The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Guardian, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. His fiction and poetry have appeared in places such as Westerly, Sunspot, and The Saturday Paper. His translations include works by Simone Weil, Simone deBeauvoir, and René Girard, including the first volume of René Girard’s correspondence (Bloomsbury, 2016).

Paper: Going Troppo in Randolph Stow’s Visitants 

Abstract: “I do not want to be mad… It is like my body is a house, and some visitor has come, and attacked the person who lived there,” says Cawdor, the young patrol officer in Randolph Stow’s Visitants (1979). This paper examines how Stow reimagines the unique colonial pathology of going troppo. Set in the Trobriand Islands in 1959, Visitants is organised around the Witness Inquiry into the apparent suicide of Cawdor. The sounds of the tropics – its incessant rain, swelling seas, and rustling foliage – resonate through the reports of five witnesses. The distortion and disruption of the Wet troubles the dry, clinical composition of the Inquiry. This reading of Stow’s under-examined novel asks what it could mean to imagine the text itself as having gone troppo. How are we called to listen to Stow’s isle, full of noises?

Bio: Theodora Galanis is a postgraduate student at the University of Adelaide. Her project explores oceanic and archipelagic imaginaries in literary fiction from Australia’s tropical north and beyond. Her research forms part of the ARC SRI “Between Indian and Pacific Oceans: Reframing Australian Literatures”.

Panel: Spinoza and Disposition
Appearing alongside Anthony Uhlmann.

Bio: Moira Gatens is Emerita Challis Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney. Some recent publications include the co-editorship (with Anthony Uhlmann) of two special issue journals devoted to essays on Spinoza and Art: Textual Practice 2019, 33 (5) and Intellectual History Review 2020, 30 (3).

Panel: Literature and Technology: ALS Convention Panel 1
Appearing alongside Charles Barbour and Chris Fleming.

Paper: Artificial Intelligence and the History of Style: Poetry, Knowledge, Computation

Abstract: When the Silicon Valley tech-conglomerate Open AI launched ChatGPT in late 2022, poetry became the news. Cultural commentators marvelled at the ability of the large-language model to write poetry in a suite of different styles, with ‘Shakespearean’ being a favoured adjective. That poetry should be the medium through which a Silicon Valley powerhouse like OpenAI chooses to market its technology, however, continues the ongoing preoccupation post-Enlightenment scientific rationality has with poetry; the continuation of the search, as it were, for a science of verse, which has its origins in the measurement techniques imported into the U.S. from mid-century Germany. This paper revisits several key moments in the history of the scientific attempts to formalize and reproduce the singularity of literary style, focusing in particular on the discussions about style conducted in the mid-1960s journal Computers & the Humanities. This paper thus offers a historical poetics of computational stylistics, and an account of what in the singularity of style resists rational determination.

Bio: Christian R. Gelder is a Research Fellow at Macquarie University, Sydney. He completed his PhD in English at Cambridge in 2022, and his monograph Poetic Explanations: The Search for a Science of Verse is under consideration with UPenn Press. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Modernism/modernity, The Cambridge Quarterly, Australian Humanities Review and with Robert Boncardo, he is the co-author of Mallarmé: Rancière, Milner, Badiou (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018). He has just begun writing another book on American psychiatry and cultural media entitled ‘Happy, Healthy, Efficient, and Adaptable: Mental Health, A Cultural History’.

Panel: Colonial Adventures
Appearing alongside Rachel Weaver.

Paper: Colonial Convict and Transportation Adventures.
Co-authored by Rachel Weaver.

Abstract: This paper is taken from a forthcoming book titled Colonial Adventure. Colonial adventure was one of the grand narratives of colonisation. Colonial adventurers were invariably the agents of colonisation and colonisation always followed the routes they took. But not always. Some adventurers never reached their destination, getting lost or shipwrecked; others deviated from the trajectories of colonisation by choice, often as an outright act of refusal.

This paper looks at convict and transportation adventures. Convicts were an unpaid labour force, coerced and conscripted by law into the raw business of colonisation, building roads, clearing forests, planting crops etc. But convicts also almost immediately absconded, in many cases leaving the colonies to get as far away as they possibly could. We look at the earliest examples of absconding convicts; for many, China was both a real and an imaginary destination. The greatest convict escape, in March 1791, involved the theft of a six-oar boat, with the convict crew (with infants on board) rowing all the way from Warrane/Sydney Cove to West Timor. Convicts even took command of large ships. A first-hand account of ‘convict piracy’ is given in the memoirs of James Porter, one of a number of convicts who, in January 1834, seized the Frederick, a brig that had been left at Parralaongatek/Macquarie Harbour, on the west coast of lutruwita/Tasmania, when the penal settlement there was being closed down; they sailed to Chile.

We then look at three colonial convict novels, beginning with Henry Savery’s Quintus Servinton (1830) as a point of contrast – since it is not a colonial adventure. (As E. Morris Miller once remarked, Savery ‘failed to let himself go in full blast’.) A discussion of James Tucker’s Ralph Rashleigh (c. 1845) will look at historical contexts for the novel and argue that it is an example of what we call the ‘Sadean picaresque’. Among other things, we focus on Rashleigh’s four-year ‘interlude’ with Aboriginal people somewhere along the northern Queensland coast: a remarkable (and peaceful) moment in a colonial novel that otherwise relentlessly torments and punishes its protagonist. We then look at Marcus Clarke’s His Natural Life (1870-72), which returns to Van Diemen’s Land in the 1830s and draws on Porter’s memoirs as John Rex and other convicts steal the Osprey – and sail to China. As with Quintus Servinton and Ralph Rashleigh, we note connections to slavers and slavery, and to profiteering in the sugar industry. But we also note that Clarke’s novel, especially in its Parralaongatek/Macquarie Harbour scenes, makes no mention of Aboriginal (palawa) people, effectively erasing them from its narrative. We end the paper by accounting for Clarke’s novel as a ‘Sadean melodrama’ that – much like Ralph Rashleigh – refuses to allow its protagonist to participate in any kind of colonial future.

Bio: Ken Gelder is Emeritus Professor of English at the University of Melbourne. His books include Reading the Vampire (Routledge, 1994), Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation (Melbourne UP 1998: with Jane M. Jacobs), Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field (Routledge, 2004) and Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practice (Routledge, 2007). With Rachael Weaver, he is co-author of Colonial Australian Fiction: Character Types, Social Formations, and the Colonial Economy (Sydney UP, 2017) and The Colonial Kangaroo Hunt (Melbourne UP, 2020). Their book Colonial Adventure will be published by Melbourne UP in October 2024, the first in a projected series of books on Colonial Australian Culture.

Paper: “It was the end of our life together”: Family Breakage and Repair in the Separation Stories of Aunty Ruth Hegarty
Co-authored by Kate Cantrell and Nycole Prowse.

Abstract: Aunty Ruth Hegarty’s award-winning memoir, Is That You, Ruthie? (1999), is the author’s testimony of the extensive damage caused by the sanctioned removal and control of First Nations families under the Australian government’s policy of ‘protection’. Hegarty’s memoir, which can be read as a separation narrative, is an attempt to impose order and structure on the chaos and trauma that she endured as a child who was forcibly removed from family and Country, and interned in the dormitory system at Cherbourg mission. At the same time, Hegarty dismantles the colonial invention of native chaos and institutional order as she recounts, with characteristic humour, the ordinary, everyday ways that the dormitory girls engaged in counter-narratives of repair, resistance, and cultural renegotiation. Similarly, in Leah Purcell’s stage adaptation (2023) of the same name, Purcell combines storytelling with archival material to bridge the theatrical and historical worlds of the play and to invoke the audience’s obligation to bear witness. As a result, both Hegarty and Purcell remediate colonial ideas of chaos and order in a counter-discourse of memory and truth that questions what can and cannot be mended.

Bio: Jessica Gildersleeve FHEA is Professor of English Literature and Associate Head of School (Research) at the University of Southern Queensland. She is the author and editor of several books, including The Routledge Companion to Australian Literature (2021), and is the current President of the Australian University Heads of English (AUHE).

Paper: Was Jack Lindsay really a Marxist?

Abstract: Marxist communism in politics and modernism in the arts were prominent among twentieth century reactions to modernity that had chaotic impacts. The Anglo-Australian author Jack Lindsay was closely involved with both. If someone knows anything about Jack Lindsay, they are likely to know that as a young man he was closely associated with the anti-modernist, classicising ideas and projects of his father, artist and novelist Norman Lindsay. He then moved to England, broke with Norman, and became a Marxist Communist who wrote a great many books. I want to unsettle that narrative. 

Lindsay scholars increasingly appreciate that the so-called “vitalism” of his youth continued to play an important role in his thought after he adopted communist politics. I want to go further to argue that it is not very illuminating to read Jack Lindsay as a Marxist. I consider the many ways in which his views differed from or contradicted what is generally understood to be Marxism. Lindsay’s system is more usefully understood as a materialist soteriology with roots in Neoplatonism.  In critical discussions of a novel and some poems, I will endeavour to illustrate the benefits of not confining him to a Marxist frame.  

Bio: Paul Gillen has degrees in Anthropology and Philosophy and is currently undertaking doctoral research at the University of New South Wales, Canberra.  His publications include Faithful to the Earth: A Jack Lindsay Compendium and Colonialism and Modernity with Devleena Ghosh.

Panel: Circulation, Time and Refusals of Order in Literary Forms
Appearing alongside Erika Carreon.

Paper: Antiextractive Poetics in Bodies of Water

Abstract: While ocean voyages across history have enabled colonial expansion, appropriation, and circulation of commodities under capitalist production, bodies of water across the planet have served as sites for accumulation and extraction. As Liam Campling and Alejandro Colàs show, bodies of water are not only aqueous terrain to be conquered but are also rich in animal, mineral and other natural resources. As such, water becomes a site that, as allows, as Marx writes, ‘a greater annihilation of space by time.’ In this paper I compare the poetry of two Indigenous poets, Jazz Money (‘bila, a river cycle’) and dg nanouk okpkik (Blood Snow), to show how their respective engagements with water in poetry, from two geographically different Indigenous anticolonial perspectives, suggest ways of thinking through and against the extractive logic of colonial-capitalism.

Bio: Elena Gomez is a poet and current PhD candidate in the University of Melbourne Creative Writing Department and holds an MFA from the University of New South Wales (Art & Design).  

Paper: The Adventure of Estrangement: Reframing Chaos as Wonder in Works of Science Fiction and Fantasy

Abstract: As turbulent as the current moment is, it is by no means the first time humanity has had to face chaotic and dangerous circumstances. Writers of speculative fiction are among those who have sought out and embraced the inherent possibilities of chaos in their time, reframing it as narrative possibility and the chance to develop a radically altered viewpoint about personal and societal challenges. One of the fundamental tools they have used is the idea of “estrangement”: a powerful sense of forces and realities that surpass humanity, the contemplation of which stretches human understanding past its ability to comprehend. This paper argues that, in reframing the disorientation that societal chaos produces as the chance to confront and experience the numinous, the sublime, the wondrous, and the grotesque, writers of speculative fiction offer an approach that can yield crucial new insights and equip thinkers to expand the limitations of traditional problem-solving.

Bio: Laura E. Goodin has taught and mentored students in creative and academic writing at universities in Australia and overseas, and delivers workshops internationally and online to writers of all ages and backgrounds. She serves on the editorial board of Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research, and as an editorial advisor of the journal Science Fiction: A Review of Speculative Literature. She holds a PhD in creative writing from the University of Western Australia. She has published two novels and numerous short stories, and her plays, libretti, and poetry have been performed on three continents.

Paper: Decolonizing the Death of the Author

Abstract: Skirting the edge of chaos and order, this paper is, a partial, episodic study of the way global literatures have engaged with, critiqued, and even adopted the lessons and limitations of the poststructuralist critique of that most fetishised and also reviled of figures: the author. The paper articulates aims to account for the response of decolonial thinkers to the legacy of Barthes’s death of the author postulate—a chaotic provocation founding a newly ordered dogma—and related poststructuralist declarations. Beginning with near-contemporary responses to post-structuralist claims about the author’s death or absence from the text, several authors subtly critiqued this postulate including Edward Said and Édouard Glissant. In the early 1970s, each of these figures tried to impose a new order—and unleash novel forces—on the emerging approach to authorship that Barthes unleased.

Bio: Michael R. Griffiths is Senior Lecturer in English Literatures at the University of Wollongong. He is the author of The Distribution of Settlement: Appropriation and Refusal in Australian Literature and Culture (UWAP 2018) and his essays have appeared in Textual Practice, Discourse, and many other venues. 

Panel: JLLC Journal Panel

Bio: Raelke Grimmer is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and Applied Linguistics and Discipline Head, Education and Enabling, in the Faculty of Arts and Society.  She is one of the founding editors of Borderlands, a literary journal of the Northern Territory and a 2023 fellow in the Australia Council’s Digital Fellowship Program.  Her research interests include creative non-fiction, genre analysis, text analysis, multilingual Australian literatures and mono/multilingualism in Australia, as well as autonomous language learning. Her creative writing has been published in Australian literary journals Westerly, Griffith Review, Kill Your Darlings and Meniscus. She is President of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association (AULLA), and an editor of the association’s journal, Journal of Language, Literature and Culture.

Panel: Literature and Technology: ALS Convention Panel 2
Appearing alongside Norma Lam-Saw and Tyne Sumner.

Paper: Photography, Novelty, & Decadent Poetics

Abstract: This paper focuses on late nineteenth-century attempts to harness the novelty of photography to promote poetry to a new audience of readers. My example here is an 1891 Bodley Head edition of Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Casa Guidi Windows – a long poetic meditation on the chaos and violence of the 1848 revolutions in Italy.  This edition was introduced by the Decadent critic and poet Agnes Mary Frances Robinson and featured a photographic frontispiece of the Casa Guidi, Barrett Browning’s house in Florence.

The first section of this paper reads between the photograph of Casa Guidi and Robinson’s poetics with the following questions in mind. Why did Bodley Head include a photographic illustration?  Was it expedience? A labour-saving device, as Sianne Ngai describes the gimmick, efficiently visualising the logic of literary pilgrimage. Or is the inclusion of the photograph an aesthetic decision designed to intensify the allure of this new edition of a forgotten long poem featuring a preface by a well-respected member of a new generation of poets? The second section of the paper considers how the photographic frontispiece and Robinson’s political critique expose the poem’s partial view of the failed republican revolutions of 1848.  This paratextual framing has a perversely distancing effect that risks reducing Casa Guidi Windows to a collectible anachronism, while simultaneously attempting to enchant and reanimate interest in its form and politics.

Bio: Helen Groth is an expert on the history of literature, with particular expertise in nineteenth-century literature, literary sound studies, and literature & photography. Her current book projects explore aspects of literature’s enduring engagement with riotous activity.  Her monograph Riotous Lives and Literary Writing is in progress and a recently published co-edited collection Writing the Global Riot: Literature in a Time of Crisis (Oxford University Press, 2023) draws together scholars from across the globe to consider the various ways writers over time and in different contexts have shaped cultural perceptions of the riot as a distinctive form of political and social expression. The Edinburgh Companion to Literature and Sound Studies, co-edited with Julian Murphet, has also recently been published by Edinburgh University Press in 2024.

Paper: ‘Features Proper to Such a Setting’: The Cultural Imaginaries of Moonstone Luck

Abstract: During the early twentieth century, predominant Australian narratives about Asia reflected a multifaceted cultural heritage influenced by British and European notions of essentialism and Orientalism. Zora Cross’s Moonstone Luck (1930) is a novella which exemplifies the early existence of what might be considered a transnational imaginary in Australian literature. The novella deviates, even if crudely, from the tradition of depicting imperial-colonial-other relationships in outright antagonistic terms; unique in its representation of an ambivalence towards the so-called ‘East’ through various cross-cultural encounters, and in emphasising complexities of place and identity. It is also notable as a work of serialised fiction, in demonstrating that historical Australian newspapers hold import for consideration as a transnational (and perhaps transcultural) space and as a significant site of socio-cultural and literary development, where multiple cultural imaginaries are engaged in literary form.

Bio: Shireen Hafesjee is a second-year PhD candidate at the Australian National University. For her Honours thesis she won the Grahame Johnston Prize in Australian Literature in 2022. She is currently researching representations of Asian people in historical and contemporary Australian literature.

Paper: Sterne, Dessaix, and the Chaos of Life-Writing

Abstract: In the history of the early novel Laurence Sterne’s two disruptive productions, Tristram Shandy (1759-67) and A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) have always stood out, complicating a common narrative about the “rise of realism” in British fiction and upending conventions of linearity with their famous digressions, meta-commentaries, and play with non-linguistic elements. His novels stage not an orderly progression, but the chaos and fragmentation that life narratives (also) invite.

The Sentimental Journey, detailing the wanderings of “Yorick” through France (Sterne dying before the projected extension of the voyage to Italy) challenges the grand tour model of itineraries constructed around important sites and destinations in the service of acquiring cultural capital. Instead Sterne writes of traveling on impulse, random encounters with minor or anonymous figures, the meanings of which are unclear and possibly trivial, and fears of imminent death.

Robert Dessaix has described Sterne’s novel as “a homage to non-linearity, digression, the errant …  a journey without a destination”, and recounted its influence on his writing of Night Letters: A Journey through Switzerland and Italy: a text that narrates his own multiple divagations and confrontations with mortality. My paper proposes to explore Sterne’s representations of chaos –or his keeping us “at the edge of chaos” (Stuart Sim), and how Dessaix responds to this in his travel narrative, elucidating some of the possibilities Sterne’s antinovel opens up in relation to the present.

Bio: I am Professor of English and Humanities at Reed College in Portland, Oregon, specializing  primarily in 18th-and 19th-century British literature. I grew up in Melbourne and attended the University of Melbourne before moving to the U.S. to get my Ph.D from the Johns Hopkins University in 1994. I taught at universities in Florida and California before coming to Reed in 2002. My main scholarly focus is on 18th-century sentimental fiction by Sterne, Oliver Goldsmith, Henry Mackenzie, and others, along with its intellectual context; in particular, Adam Smith’s philosophical writings on emotion. I’ve published numerous articles on these topics, along with a scholarly edition of Mackenzie’s 1771 novel The Man of Feeling. 

Paper: A Funk Odyssey: Corporeal ‘unbecoming’ in Fiona McGregor’s Indelible Ink

Abstract: Fiona McGregor’s 2010 novel, Indelible Ink, maps Marie King’s mutation from Mosman housewife to heroine outcast. This paper draws on queer scholar Jack Halberstam’s theories of failure and shadow feminisms to examine this ‘unbecoming’ played out through the body. It argues that the queering of Marie’s identity – exemplified in her tattooing – enables “self-destruction, masochism, an antisocial femininity, and a refusal of the essential bond of mother and daughter” embedded in patriarchal disempowerment.  The novel flips generational narratives of rebellion (from rebellious child to rebellious mother) and rejects heteronormative narratives of progress. Marie’s unbecoming is a reeking sensorial experience that funks up new possibilities for living, “exfoliating the layers of normative expectations, values, desires and bodily stances.”  As McGregor writes, “Indelible Ink is about … true radical freedom on all levels. It’s about dancing with the devil, celebrating life in extremis, and going towards death with all guns blazing.”  

Bio: Kay Harrison is a writer and PhD candidate (creative practice) at UNSW Sydney. Her research locates a queer regional imaginary, after queer feminist scholar Gayatri Gopinath, within Australian female and non-binary authorship since 1980. It asks how queer representations in four critically under-read novels reimagine the ‘female’ body.

Paper: Will AI produce a simplified, more orderly society or introduce more complexity and chaos? Let’s ask the novelists.

Abstract: For 20 years or more novelists have speculated about the social consequences of AI. Although the AI “characters” of these narratives are more complex than any machines yet devised, they present thought experiments for assessing the trajectory of current research, especially Artificial General Intelligence, and its potential effects on personal and social relationships. Most, scientists have promoted AI as ushering in a utopia characterised by increased personal freedom, instant access to information from immense data banks, leading to scientific and medical breakthroughs that derive orderly solutions. Yet novelists have more frequently envisaged a dystopia of social inequality, alienation, and disorder, with potential for domination by AI. As Alan Turing famously said, “If a machine can think, it might think more intelligently than we do, and then where should we be?” This paper will explore these issues through recent works of fiction, with some reference also to film.

Bio: Roslynn Haynes FAHA is Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Arts and Media UNSW. A graduate of both biochemistry and humanities, her contributions to the field of science and literature are internationally recognised. She has published five major books in the field: H.G. Wells: Discoverer of the Future, From Faust to Strangelove, Explorers of the Southern Sky, From Madman to Crime Fighter and coedited Under the Literary Microscope: Science and Society in the Contemporary Novel, and twenty-four journal articles.  She is writing a monograph exploring the social, personal and philosophical consequences of AI as depicted in fiction and film. 

Paper: Towards (Dis)order: The Feeling of Understanding in J. M. Coetzee’s “Jesus” Novels 

Abstract: This paper examines the process of reading as a force of disorder in J. M. Coetzee’s “Jesus” novels. Comprising The Childhood of Jesus (2013), The Schooldays of Jesus (2016), and The Death of Jesus (2019), the novels situate literature as a site of dynamic creative activity at the same time as they trace this fecundity to not the quality of a literary work but rather the activity of interpretation at its most fundamental level, underlining that to read is to create a reading. Drawing on the work of John Wall, an ethicist in childhood studies, the task of this paper is to explore how the search for meaning is thus animated and underpinned by a feeling of understanding that is grounded upon itself, and to thus examine and appraise the extent to which the novels endorse forms of knowing that may be construed as naïve. 

Bio: Parris Heath is a PhD candidate and sessional tutor at the University of Queensland, where he teaches in the schools of Communication and Arts, and Languages and Cultures. He completed his MPhil on the metaphysical dimensions of Cormac McCarthy’s cosmology in 2020 and is currently focused on the ideas of truth, ethics, and belonging as they shape, and appear in the work of J. M. Coetzee.  

Paper: Self-Reflexive Wet Ontologies and the Oceanic Weird: Depicting a Chaotic Colonial Past in Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish

Abstract: Delys Bird suggests that a key aspect of historical fiction in Australia is “turning to the past to invest a chaotic present with some order and invoke a communal memory.”  While many works of historical fiction do this, more recent historical accounts of Australia’s colonial history use a more critical approach to depicting the past. One such example is Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish, which depicts a chaotic colonial past that challenges a communal memory of Australia’s colonial history. I argue that critical oceanic studies, and the oceanic weird, play a key role in this context as they offer what Jolene Mathison calls “sophisticated, often self-reflective models of wet ontologies.”  These self-reflexive models contribute to the novel’s aim of providing a critical account of Australia’s colonial history that foregrounds non-human histories, which allows Flanagan to not only engage critically with Tasmania’s violent colonial history but also to put these into dialogue with the environmental humanities.

Bio: Isabelle Hesse’s work is situated at the nexus of postcolonial, Jewish, and Middle Eastern studies, and she has widely published in these areas and their intersections, including on the cultural and political connections between Europe and the Middle East. She is also interested in the use of speculative fiction in settler-colonial contexts, including how speculative fiction addresses the links between colonialism and climate change.

Panel: Chaos and Order: Interdisciplinarity in Science and Humanities

Bio: Bob Hodge is Emeritus Professor of Humanities in Western Sydney University, Sydney. He has published over a wide range of areas, including Postcolonial Studies (e.g. Dark Side of the Dream, 1990, with Vijay Mishra) Australian culture (e.g. Myths of Oz, 1987, with John Fiske and Graeme Turner), Critical Discourse analysis (e.g. Language as Ideology 1993, with Gunther Kress) and Social Semiotics, making links with theories of chaos and complexity, e.g. Social Semiotics for a complex world, 2017.

Paper: How literature (from any period or tradition) helps us understand chaos and order
Co-authored by Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan.

Abstract: Literature helps us understand chaos and order. This may be through the writing process, as part of a book club discussion, or through the act of solitary reading. Modern Australian literature increasingly provides an understanding of the challenges faced by marginalised communities in liminal spaces. Communities as diverse as LGBTQI+, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the immigrant diaspora are just some who frame the chaos of their experiences through creative writing. People with Alzhemier’s disease also inhabit a liminal space, a space from which there is no return. Their final journey is imbued with chaos and order, looping the memory and body together in a surreal waltz. The journey is also a discombobulated experience for the patient’s family, friends, and carers. This paper analyses the role of Australian poetry in making meaning for father and daughter during both the negative and positive moments of experiencing Alzheimer’s disease. 

Bio: Dr Penny Holliday has a PhD in Creative Industries, which focused on Australian literature. Penny currently works at The University of Queensland, as part of the HASS and Indigenous Australian Research Data Commons (ARDC) Project in partnership with UoM. The project is titled Sandpit in the Sandstone. https://sandpitinthesandstone.com/

Panel: The absolutism of technology and the cybernetic myth
Appearing alongside Chris Conti and Chris Danta.

Paper: Jetzt / Now: Max Bense and the Automation of Literature c.1960.

Abstract: The original study of the relations between natural and machine languages at the heart of the large language models driving today’s AI was not confined to the cognitivist psychologists and logicians of post-war Boston. They were also explored in the same period by the transnational literary avant-garde. To illustrate this alternate history of AI, I will take the case of the German philosopher, cybernetician, and information theorist, Max Bense (1910-1990), and his extensive contributions to what I will call the automation of literature. Specifically, I will look at how this played out across Bense’s own poetic contributions (‘Jetzt’ is the title of one his poems), the avant-garde literary journals he presided over and, briefly, his pedagogical commitments to the neo-Bauhaus design school, the HfG Ulm (1953-1968). These investments established what is now known as computer/machine art, based in Bense’s ideas regarding information aesthetics. This is also a German history, so I will further consider the intellectual and aesthetic reconfiguration of rationality in the post-war context. The languages of cybernetics, machines, and information aesthetics were, in Bense’s eyes, the basis of a revised critical, democratic rationality. As such, the origins of AI are not simply in the imposition or amplification of the symbolic cognitivist worldview but in concrete acts of repairing science and, more widely, in establishing a cosmopolitan, post-conflict culture.

Bio: Matthew Holt is Associate Professor, Associate Director (Education), and Applied Cybernetics Lead at the Australian National University’s School of Cybernetics. His research is in the history and theory of artificial intelligence, cybernetics, the design sciences, and systems thinking. With colleagues at the School, he is currently developing and delivering a suite of short courses on cybernetic approaches to complex systems and the impact of emergent technologies, including AI. 

Panel: The Poet Laureate

Bio: Yvette Henry Holt is a multi award-winning poet, social photographer, editor, and publisher. Chairperson of the First Nations Australia Writers Network FNAWN, Board Director AP Australian Poetry, Yvette holds more than twenty years of national literary associations and facilitations, including researcher to AustLit: Black Words Database 2006-2009, First Nations Advisor to the Bibliography of Australian Poetry 2018-current. For more than twelve years Yvette has lived and worked in remote Aboriginal communities throughout Central Australia including the WA/NT borders, APY/NPY South Australia/NT, Queensland/NT borders, Utopia, and throughout the Barkly an surrounding areas of Tennant Creek, within the folds of literature, creative writing workshops, financial and English literacy, mentoring, and volunteering her time among emerging, established and multi-published Territorian writers, storytellers and poets. Yvette’s expansive body of literature works include; essays, poetry, prose, short-stories best of collections, many of which have been anthologised nationally and internationally in print and online. Yvette’s artistic queer lens of photography include portfolios of urbane and religious erotica as well as subjective landscapes throughout the Central Australian deserts including Spinifex Scriptures eTropic19.1(2020) Special Issue: ‘Environmental Artistic Practices and Indigeneity’.

Panel: Can the law provide order in an industry of chaos? Authors’ perception of authorship and ownership and the influence of AI
Appearing alongside Laura E. Goodin, Feliticty Castagna, Sheila Ngöc Pham and Omar Sakr.

Bio: Sarah Hook is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at Western Sydney University. Researching at the intersections of law and literary theory, her research centres on authors and artists and creative freedom.  Her publications generally look at romanticism, postmodernism, and contemporary modes of textual production and how these ideologies intersect with legal contexts such as moral rights, defamation, copyright, regulation of the press, and other impediments to the free exchange of ideas and expression.

Paper: Manuscript Revision and the Printed Page

Abstract: In spite of the notable work of media and textual scholars, the print versus manuscript divide still stubbornly persists. In the nineteenth century, manuscripts would be transcribed and published while printed texts were written over, cut up and reworked back into a manuscript state and then kept in private collections or disseminated among a range of intermediaries: collaborators, admirers, friends or potential editors. This paper examines the work of Walt Whitman, an American poet who would revise almost everything he wrote: poems, prose volumes, essays, lectures, even private letters. From as early as the first draft lines of his epoch-defining first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855) until the final writings of 1891, Whitman’s manuscripts are strewn with handwritten notes, marginal and interlineal insertions, deletions, and cut-outs. Since many of these revisions would not appear in print, I show how these writings reveal processes of textual transformation from a chaotic manuscript state into the comparative order of printed forms—and back again.  

Bio: Josh Iaquinto is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Sydney. In 2018, he completed an MA thesis at the University of Melbourne on Walt Whitman’s “Blue Book”, the poet’s private copy of a heavily revised third edition of Leaves of Grass (1860). His present work examines manuscript verse fragments in nineteenth-century America, provisionally titled Imperfect Parts: The Manuscript Fragment in Nineteenth-Century American Verse, 1840-1900.   

Paper: The Occident in the Eye of the Diaspora: A Hybrid Representation

Abstract: This paper explores the concept of ‘Othering’ the West or ‘Occidentalsim’, which continues to manifest in different cultural expressions, especially in contemporary diaspora literature. Occidentalism as Burma and Margalit (2005) explores is a lens through which the West is viewed by the non-West often with an anti-Western connotation. My focal point here is Sri Lankan diaspora literature, a genre that offers a vantage point for the examination of how individuals residing in Western contexts engage in ‘Othering’ of the West. This phenomenon will be observed through a close reading of Chai Time at Cinnamon Gardens by Shankari Chandran, and The Change of Skies by Yasmin Goonaratne, works which fall within the category of ‘Occidentalist literature’, a classification introduced by Sahil (2013). 

Bio: Sharmila Jayasinghe is a published author and a 3rd year PhD student at The University of Sydney. Her research interests are in postcolonial theory with a specific focus on Orientalism and Occidentalism. Her research study investigates Occidentalistic ideology as anti-Western, nationalistic and anti-colonial in order to understand pre and post-colonial articulation and invention of the West by the Sri Lankan society with specific attention to the changes in perspective by the diaspora. Sharmila holds a Master of Arts ( Creative Writing and Literature) from Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia and a Bachelor of Arts from University of Colombo, Sri Lanka.

Paper: Dissolving the architecture of the concept – the unerring chaos of Anthony Mannix


Abstract: For over 35 years the writing and art practice of Anthony Mannix has been what he calls his “compass” to navigate the “unerring chaos” of the “schizophrenic trek” into the landscape of his unconscious. Chaos sits at the core of Mannix’s experience of his unconscious – a spontaneous, animated realm offering unlimited generative potential. In Mannix’s world-view chaos is the precondition for lived-metaphors so all-encompassing they are experienced as “flawlessly believed”.

“When the architecture of concept is dissolved one is hit by the storm. This is chaos. No logical argument will deliver you from this place and yet no logic can oppose successfully what you wish to build. Chaos is climatic and elemental.”

This paper will discuss the role of chaos in what Mannix describes as his “speculative narratives” where language itself becomes animate, creating not a body of work in the conventional sense, but his “being of art”. 


Bio: Dr Gareth Sion Jenkins is a teacher, writer, artist and publisher. His first collection, Recipes for the Disaster, won the 2019 Anne Elder Award. His second book, The Inclination Compass, a multimedia poetic narrative, was published in 2023. Gareth has been documenting the writing and art of Anthony Mannix over the last 20 years in The Atomic Book. In 2019 he selected and edited, with Mannix, The Toy of the Spirit—Mannix’s first collection drawn from his vast output of hand-written artist books. In 2020 Gareth founded the small press the Apothecary Archive. Gareth teaches creative writing at Macquarie University.

Panel: Disability
Appearing alongside Amanda Tink and Jessica White.

Paper: “For once, let us squat upon time/no-time,”: How speculative worldbuilding imagines disability

Abstract: My research considers how speculative worldbuilding may be a narrative tool for readers to imagine crip futures and interrogate complex and contradictory experiences of disability. Rachael Hartman’s Tess of the Road (2018) and In The Serpent’s Wake (2022) are two novels for young adults that demonstrate some of these possibilities by the use of ‘contradictory case’ – a fantastical linguistic element (‘-utl’) that allows those who speak and understand it to express a concept and its opposite simultaneously.

The acceptance of a concept and its simultaneous opposite is powerful from a crip perspective, as can be seen from existing discourse on the erasure of pain, and the desire for medical relief of pain, in some variants of the social model of disability. The reconciliation of disability pride with frustration over pain or impairment has historically been problematic in disability studies. Disabled experience is often one of opposites and contradictions that are considered impossible or ‘chaotic’ from an abled perspective and Hartman’s contradictory case makes its own case for articulating our own ‘crip-utl’—a change in language that embraces multiple and experiences, even from within a single person.  This paper demonstrates the crip power of contradictory case, as well as ways in which other disability-led concepts such as crip time can be expressed in speculative fiction. 

Bio: Kit Kavanagh-Ryan is a queer crip academic and poet based in Melbourne, Australia. In 2024 Kit completed a PhD in children’s literature and disability studies at Deakin University, focusing on crip worldbuilding in speculative fiction for young adults. They were a contributor to Growing Up Disabled in Australia, published by Black Inc, as well as Andy Jackson’s upcoming edited collection on crip poetry and the future of health, Raging Grace, published by Puncher and Whatman. Recent publications also include works in Australian Literary Studies, Australian Poetry Journal, and Cordite. 

Paper: Chaos and Cows, or Versions of the Australian Counter-Pastoral

Abstract: There is a memorable story about how Jacques Derrida once gave a talk on the topic of cows. After a brief interlude, Derrida again took his place in front of the audience and said: ‘I’m told it is pronounced “chaos”’. So we must imagine—as Phil Gentry does in the tweet that popularised this anecdote—that for a good period of time ‘everyone was flummoxed but listened carefully, and took notes about… cows’. For all the whimsy of these two words paired by chance—chaos and cows—there is something more than simply amusing in imagining sitting in this audience, listening to a Derridean disquisition on cows that suddenly becomes a serious analysis of chaos. For in the Australian context, cows have an historically-loaded relationship to settlement, order, and chaos, or as Watkin Tench writes in a moment when one could count on one’s fingers the number of cows on the continent: ‘as far as the unsettled state of matters would allow, confusion gave place to system’. This paper aims to think through some of the complex ways in which chaos and cows feature in Australian settler-colonialism and the ‘counter-pastoral’, bringing together discussions of William Empson, John Kinsella, Fiona Probyn-Rapsey, Michael Farrell, Kyle Kohinga, and—of course—Derrida.  

Bio: Louis Klee is an Australian writer and philosopher. He teaches literature and philosophy at the University of Cambridge, where is a fellow and assistant professor at Trinity Hall. He was a JUNCTURE Fellow for the Sydney Review of Books, ‘a fellowship program presenting a series of new essays […] by leading critics’, where he wrote on everything from Australian historiography to the French philosopher Alain Badiou’s unlikely reception in Australia (with Christian Gelder). He has also held a visiting fellowship and writing residency at the Australian National University’s Centre for Australian Literary Cultures.   

Paper: H.D. and visionary writing in a time of crisis 

Abstract: I argue in this paper that the poet and author H.D. used visionary writing in a time of crisis to resist ordinary systems of power by turning to visions of the end. In doing so, H.D. uses the act of writing itself as a means of order and transformation, using the visionary to posit a transformed future with collective unity – of the living and the dead – at its centre. H.D., in Trilogy and The Gift, embraces the language of apocalypse as a way of articulating a refigured social order wherein peace is possible through the conflation of past, present, and future. This is seen through the way in which H.D. takes on the voices of the dead in her texts, bringing the horrors of the past and the horrors of the present together to birth something new. Each text presents, through writing, apocalyptic hope as a mode of resistance to a cultural and historic moment of extreme crisis.

Bio: I am a PhD Candidate at the University of New South Wales, working on “Trauma, Apocalypse and Visionary Writing in Modernist Women’s Literature.” My primary focus is on the authors Virginia Woolf, H.D. and Jean Rhys. My supervisor for this project is Associate Professor Sean Pryor. 

Paper: “In these Realms of [George III]”, sung John Grant, in 1805, “Who can Rejoice?”

Abstract: Penal, colonial, and autocratic, early NSW law interpellated British exiles into an array of new, local subject positions, subtending a theatre of political and social aggrievement whose actors sought, variously, to harness or protest legislative (dis)continuities between NSW and Britain, both perceived and actual. Poetry was a key tool in this culture of grievance, and was in turn invigorated by it. Even that most outmoded of British poetic genres – the Ode for the King’s birthday – was, remarkably, to see its long-waning political, poetic and affective significance completely renovated in penal-colonial NSW, to protest the rule of King George’s representative – the autocratic Governor P.G. King. Exhuming the earliest penal-colonial ‘parodies’ of the Birthday Ode from the archive, this paper will offer an account of the “para-ode” as the poetic mode most emblematic of the penal-colonial condition.”

Bio: Kyle Kohinga is a PhD candidate at Deakin University, reading both 19th century and contemporary Australian poetry through Australian labour history and settler-colonial law. A recipient of the A.D. Hope prize and the Phillip Brown award for Australian history, their work is forthcoming both in the Cambridge History of Australian Poetry (with Tom Ford) and Lionel Fogarty in Poetry and Politics (Palgrave 2024). 

Panel: Literature and Technology: ALS Convention Panel 2
Appearing alongside Helen Groth and Tyne Sumner.

Paper: Communication, Control, Contingency: Dead Letters in the Age of the Algorithmic and AI Technologies

Abstract: At the end of Herman Melville’s 1853 novella, ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’, the narrator concludes his story by divulging in a rumour about Bartleby in the dead letter office. Despite seeming radically outdated in our age of digital technologies, both the notion of dead letters and the dead letter office bear resonances with systems theories underpinning algorithmic and AI technologies. Information, like in letters, needs to be quantified and transmitted between senders and receivers (communication). Automatic feedback systems have efficiently automated the labour of dead letter office space and clerk – maintaining, regulating and managing (control) transmissions of information. Finally, despite the recursive logic of machines that has seen the reduction of the contingent, absolute contingency still remains as what separates humans from AI; the incalculable, unforeseeable and uncontrollable. Drawing on Yuk Hui’s work on the algorithmic catastrophe, Nobert Weiner’s ideas of cybernetic control, this paper reflects on contingency through the notion of dead letters in Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’.

Bio: Norma Lam-Saw is an Associate Lecturer in the Humanities and Communication Arts at Western Sydney University. Her research interests are in passive resistance, comparative literature and political philosophy. She is the author of Passive Resistance in Herman Melville’s ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ (Edinburgh University Press; forthcoming 2025). She is currently developing interdisciplinary research on notions of the digital subject with respect to questions of subjectivity and political agency.  

Paper: Against bushbashing: navigational notes for a shrinking discipline

Abstract: In late 2023 I spent five weeks or so walking a long trail that is notoriously difficult to navigate. As I was finding my way—making mistakes, backtracking, bashing through scrub—at night in my tent I was reading Robert McFarlane’s The Old Ways. He writes about the long history of the imbrication of walking and writing, and notes the ongoing practice of walking as custodianship of story and Country in Australia.

In this paper I use the practices of walking—retracing steps, making ways, and keeping them open for others—to suggest some principles for navigating the institutional conditions of the discipline of literary studies in Australia. While the production of literature in Australia is flourishing, the conditions in which it is taught and studied are increasingly constrained. I argue that one way forward here is to not always push forward: rather, to resist institutional demands to ‘break new ground’, amass solo research funding and prove individual innovation but rather, to acknowledge forebears and predecessors, to share resources, and to be willing to walk back along old ways to keep them open for others.

Bio: Julieanne Lamond is Associate Professor of English, Head of the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics and co-director of the Centre for Australian Literary Studies at Australian National University. Since 2016 she has co-edited the journal Australian Literary Studies. Her research focuses on literary reception, especially in relation to gender and the Australian context. Her recent monograph, Lohrey, was highly commended for the ACT Book of the Year and won the Walter McRae Russell Award. 

Panel: Aboriginal critiques of settler colonial epistemological orders.
Appearing alongside Evelyn Araluan, and Barry Corr.

Abstract: For Aboriginal people living on the stolen lands of so-called Australia, the epistemological and axiological orders of settler-colonialism are invasive social forms naturalised by their maintenance in dominant discursive practices and institutions. While generative and liberatory work to decentre and dispose of these forms has been advanced by Indigenous and anticolonial scholars over many decades, universities and other scholarly institutions in the settler-colony have been increasingly shifting towards a rhetoric of decolonisation and Indigenisation that seeks to commodify cultural knowledges, as opposed to transforming systems of oppression and dominance. Aboriginal scholar-practitioners working within or beyond settler-colonial institutions today must now navigate both the erasure and exclusion of culturally informed practices in favour of dominant modes of the colony, and the elite capture of these knowledges by way of settler-moves-to-innocence or the logic of elimination. In this panel three Aboriginal scholar-practitioners navigate these closures to explore the liberatory possibilities of diverse modes of discursive resistance and refusal that are premised on the inverted authorial gaze, the subversive deconstruction of the master’s tools, and alternate, non-extractive creative epistemologies.

Bio: Jeanine Leane is a Wiradjuri writer, poet, critic, and essayist from southwest New South Wales. Her first volume of poetry, Dark Secrets After Dreaming: A.D. 1887-1961 (2010, Presspress) won the Scanlon Prize for Indigenous Poetry, 2010. The manuscript for her first novel, Purple Threads (UQP), won the David Unaipon Award for an unpublished Indigenous writer in 2010; and was shortlisted for the 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize. Her poetry, short stories, critique, and essays have been published in Hecate: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Women’s Liberation Australian Poetry Journal, Antipodes, Westerly, Overland and the Sydney Review of Books. Jeanine has published widely in Aboriginal literature, writing otherness, literary critique, and creative non-fiction.  She was the recipient of the University of Canberra Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Poetry Prize, and she has won the Oodgeroo Noonucal Prize for Poetry twice (2017 & 2019); and was the 2019 recipient of the Red Room Poetry Fellowship for her project called Voicing the Unsettled Space: Rewriting the Colonial Mythscape. Jeanine taught Creative Writing and Aboriginal Literature at the University of Melbourne from 2016-2023. She is the recipient of an Australian Research Council (ARC) Fellowship for a project called ‘Aboriginal Writing: Shaping the literary and cultural history of Australia, since 1988’ (2014-2018); and a second ARC grant that looks at Indigenous Storytelling and the Archive (2020-2023). In 2020 Jeanine edited Guwayu – for all times – a collection of First Nations Poetry commissioned by Red Room Poetry and published by Magabala Books. In 2021 she was the recipient of the School of Literature Art and Media (SLAM) Poetry Prize University of Sydney for an unpublished book-length collection of poetry, called gawimarra gathering. In 2023, Jeanine was the winner of the David Harold Tribe Prize for Poetry – Australia’s richest poetry prize. Gawimarra, gathering was published by the University of Queensland Press in 2024.

Paper: How literature (from any period or tradition) helps us understand chaos and order.
Co-authored by Penny Holliday.

Abstract: The seminal work of Puberty Blues (Carey and Lette, 1979) stands as a pivotal cornerstone, delineating order via the unspoken codes and mores of the surfer culture at Cronulla Beach. This paradigm, crafted in this iconic text, resonates through the annals of contemporary Australian surf fiction. Each narrative thread weaves through the modern literary landscape echoing a strand of the fabric first spun in the 1980s with Puberty Blues (Carey and Lette, 1979), continuing to shape and define the cultural contours of this milieu.  This paper delves into the premise of how Australian surf fiction orchestrates a semblance of order from the inherent chaos of the oceanic backdrop. It examines the interplay between the wild, untamed essence of the sea and the structured narrative arcs crafted by authors, highlighting the manner in which these tales harness the capricious nature of the ocean to reflect deeper human experiences and societal structures.

Bio: Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan is an award-winning short story writer, journalist, columnist, and editor. Her work has appeared in Australia’s most widely read newspapers including The Sydney Morning Herald, Sun-Herald, The Australian, and the Sunday Telegraph. She has been a travel editor for Elle Cuisine Magazine, Australian Table Magazine, and Ocean Magazine. Her academic credentials include a BA (Communications) from WSU, an MA (Creative Writing) from UTS, Masters of Teaching from UNSW and she is a PhD scholar in Creative Writing under Dr Felicity Castagna and Dr Rachel Morley at WSU. Her exegesis is Green room Gidgets: deconstructing the female surf protagonist in Australian Young Adult fiction. Nicole is also a casual academic at Western Sydney University. 

Paper: Publishing The Wandering Islands: Keeping poetry in order

Abstract: A. D. Hope’s first book of poems, The Wandering Islands, was not published until 1955 when he was 48 years old. The story of its delayed publication involves fear of censorship, an office fire, and the deletion of more than a dozen poems from the original manuscript on the advice of various parties concerned about its propriety. His Poems, published in the UK and the USA in 1961, restored some of these poems and represents a more complete picture of his achievements at the time. This paper will trace the manuscript’s journey from Clem Christesen’s first attempt to publish it in 1947, through rejection by MUP and further tinkering by Edwards and Shaw and the Commonwealth Literary Fund. The more liberal attitudes of Hamish Hamilton in the UK and Viking Penguin in the USA reveal the relatively closed nature of Australian literary publishing in the 1950s and 1960s.

Bio: Susan Lever is writing a biography of the poet, A. D. Hope.  Her books include Creating Australian Television Drama: A Screenwriting History (ASP, 2020), David Foster: The Satirist of Australia (Cambria P, 2008) and A Question of Commitment: Australian Literature in the Twenty Years After the War (Allen & Unwin, 1989). She taught at UNSW, Canberra, until 2008, and is a Life Member of ASAL.

Panel: The story of John Hughes’ plagiarism.
Appearing alongside Lachlan Brown, Richard Cooke, Emmett Stinson, and Anna Verney.

Bio: Sam Lieblich is a writer and psychiatrist working in Melbourne, Australia and conducting neuroscience research at the University of Melbourne. He is the ‘author’ of ‘Clear-cut as the words, an experimental ‘novel’ written in a unique process of artificially intelligent conservation and destruction. Sam has written articles for Art and Australia and Overland.

Panel: Polarities of the Australian Avant-Gardes
Appearing alongside Michael Farrell and A.J. Carruthers

Bio: Kate Lilley is a queer, Sydney-based poet and academic. She is the author of 3 books of poetry, Versary (Salt 2002), winner of the Grace Leven prize; Ladylike (UWAP 2012), shortlisted for the NSW Premier’s Awards, and Tilt (Vagabond 2018), winner of the Victorian Premier’s Award for Poetry. She edited Dorothy Hewett: Selected Poems (UWAP) and Margaret Cavendish: The Blazing World and other writings (Penguin Classics). She has published widely on poetry, poetics and literary history. After thirty years in the English Department at the University of Sydney she is now an Honorary Associate Professor.

Panel: “How to Get Published” Roundtable and Chat-with-an-Editor Proposal

Paper: Appearing Between Order and Chaos: The Space of Literature and the Voice of Story

Abstract: Like all binaries, order and chaos limit and restrict possibilities to just two options, are often conceived of as antidotes: order controls chaos; chaos disrupts order. This paper explores how literature dwells in the liminal space between order and chaos, neither and both, and also being something other. Literature does not belong to a binary. Literature just is. Australian Aboriginal writers Kim Scott and Alexis Wright (as just two examples, from different Country) have intuitively understood this and originated in the novel a space for story, even for dreaming/law/lore to appear – in a way that both protects and reveals, as allegories have always done. Following my definition of allegory as a structure supporting appearances that cannot otherwise appear, I show that in the liminal space, order by generic form, disrupted by colonization, a voice appears, a silent voice heard in reading, a powerful voice that can only be willfully ignored.

Bio: Brenda Machosky is Professor of English at University of Hawai`i West O`ahu, where she teaches world literature, “post”colonial literatures, and theory. Editor of Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australia/New Zealand Studies, she is also vice-president of the Council of Editors of Learned Journals. Brenda is past president of the American Association for Australasian Literary Studies (AAALS). Current research focuses on Indigenous literatures of Australia and Aotearoa. Published books include Structures of Appearing: Allegory and the Work of Literature (Fordham 2013) and the edited volume, Thinking Allegory Otherwise (Stanford 2010). Recent essays include “Allegory and the work of Aboriginal Dreaming/Law/Lore” and “Alexis Wright’s Storytelling Novel and its ‘particular kind of knowledge’”. 

Paper: Towards a Digressive Criticism: The Figure of Walking in Jen Craig’s Panthers and the Museum of Fire and Anthony Macris’s Great Western Highway

Abstract: Radically digressive texts have, in Samuel Fredericks’s words, “a fundamental desire to tell over the contents of what may (but may also not) be told.” In both Jen Craig’s Panthers and the Museum of Fire and Anthony Macris’s Great Western Highway, this desire is raised to a fundamental narrative principle, which in turn effects the form of our critical engagement with these novels. The surface plot of both novels involves a walk through Sydney’s urban landscape: from Glebe to Surry Hills in Panthers and along Parramatta Road in Great Western Highway. From these ostensibly linear surfaces, the minds of the characters wander, distracted by the landscapes they walk and by their whirring minds that replay old conversations, rethink and question memories, all while worrying about what awaits them at their destination. In this paper, I argue that the critic writing about these novels needs to be as digressive as they are. The critic becomes a textual wanderer or flaneur, someone who destabilises each text’s sense of order by seeing them as uncanny intertexts that continue to unfold with new and unexpected meanings, resisting the idea that the walks in either novel have a true destination.

Bio: Reuben Mackey is a PhD candidate at Monash University where he writes about metafiction in Australian literature, with a particular focus on Gerald Murnane, Brian Castro, John Scott, Anthony Macris and Jen Craig. His work has previously appeared in Antipodes, Meanjin and TEXT Journal.