Australian Scholarly Publishing

Networked language; culture & history in Australian poetry.

Mead (English, U. of Tasmania, Australia) collects six essays on Australian poetry that are thematically unified by concern with the way poetry is enmeshed in "networks of culture and history." Topics include the "cinematism" of Kenneth Slessor's "Five Bells;" the criminalization of poetic language and the Ern Malley hoax, in which two poets invented a modernist poet named Ern Malley as a critique of modernism; national myth-making and James McAuley's long narrative poem Captain Quiros; humanism and the poetry of Judith Wright; recent developments in the use of computer languages to generate and manipulate poetic texts; and the poetry of Lionel Fogarty as it relates to the history of language in Australia. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Profiles in courage; political actors & ideas in contemporary Asia.

A political activist, a trade unionist, a politician, a Buddhist monk, a Catholic feminist nun, a psychologist, a Nobel Laureate banker, and several academics are among those profiled as actors of agents of reform in contemporary Asia. They intermingle reflection and action, some leaning one direction and some the other. Among the topics are Wang Hui: the historian as social critic in China, Akram Osman; narrating culture and society and Afghanistan, Indonesia's pre-eminent Islamic reformer Nurcholish Madjid, and Nidhi Eoseewong and democracy from below in Thailand. Some of the 17 articles first appeared in the Australian magazine Overland since the turn of the century. The writers are historians and social scientists. The price is 39.95 Australian dollars. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)

Refugees and rebels; Indonesian exiles in wartime Australia.

Until now, Lingarad (languages and cultures, U. of Sydney) has focused her academic writings on the study of literary translation, but here she relates a unique and little known part of Australia's social and political wartime history. Between 1942 and 1947, over five thousand Indonesians sojourned in Australia for varying lengths of time, expelled from their Japanese-occupied homeland. She explores their experience living among local urban and rural communities, and the social contact there that provided the context for the significant political effects of their stay both then and later and in both countries. Of special note is the agitation and organizing in Australia around the struggle for Indonesian independence from Dutch rule that began as soon as refugees got home. Her topics include refuge in white Australia, the coming of the nationalists, the Indonesian revolution comes to an Australian country town, turbulent times, people to people, and now is the hour. The price is 39.90 Australian dollars, converted to US dollars on 9 April 2009. (Annotation ©2009 Book News Inc. Portland, OR)