Workshop on "Scientists in Australian Fiction" (12 Oct 2018) (original) (raw)
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Report - Workshop on Scientists in Australian Fiction
This is a report about my workshop on scientists in Australian fiction - held at the National Museum of Australia and supported by Inspiring the ACT (Glassblowing Performance)! Speakers included A/Prof Elizabeth Leane and Peter Goldsworthy AM. Photos by Konrad Lenz.
"Weird and fantastic realism": Science and Stories in the Work of Grant Allen
Victorian Popular Fictions Journal, 2021
Grant Allen (1848-1899) was a well-known populariser of natural history who was widely recognised for his extensive knowledge of science and his ability to refashion complex ideas for general audiences. But his status as a popular writer, coupled with a lack of formal training, placed him at the margins of professional science and impeded his serious scientific ambitions. Although Allen tended to portray fiction-writing as an economic necessity, both contemporary and recent critics have noted stylistic innovations that place him within germinal popular genres of the fin de siècle. This paper aims to show that Allen's contributions to late-Victorian popular literature derive in part from his negotiation of fiction and non-fiction genres. Focusing particularly on his experiments with the short story, it considers how and to what extent he distinguished scientific from literary writing, while revealing his views on plausibility in fiction to be more complex than is typically recognised. Little-studied reviews of Allen's popular fiction suggest the wider contemporary impact of his experimentations. That critics recognised his style as unconventional endorses a reappraisal of his place within developments in late-Victorian popular literature.
The Korean Journal of the History of Science, 2013
The scientific life of the Australian biologist Sir Frank Macfarlane Burnet is examined against the context of the development of an independent Australian scientific identity over the course of the twentieth century. Born in 1899 Burnet was part of a generation of Australians who needed to travel abroad to gain research credentials, but is atypical in that he became one of the first to deliberately return after obtaining his PhD to pursue an active research career. He played a pivotal role in putting Australian medical research on the world’s map, both through his own significant research in the fields of animal virology and immunology, and as director of the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute for Medical Research (WEHI), which under his leadership gained an international reputation for excellence. This paper attempts to tease out the relationships between Burnet, WEHI, and Australia and to place Burnet’s life and work in their institutional and national contexts.
Contemporary Australian Literature : A World Not Yet Dead
2015
for their kind and understanding advice and to Australian writers in general for being patient with critical scrutiny. I hope this is the book Vivian Smith envisioned when he and I discussed the outlines of this project at Circular Quay in January 2010. Essays of mine adjacent to this book though not part of it shed light on some figures undertreated here. David Malouf is given a full overview in my essay for the 2014 special issue of the Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (JASAL) on his work, while there is more on Tim Winton in my essay in Tim Winton: Critical Essays, edited by Lyn McCredden and Nathanael O'Reilly (University of Western Australia Press, 2014). Christos Tsiolkas' The Slap and Elliot Perlman's Three Dollars, as well as their precedents in D. H. Lawrence's Kangaroo, are examined in my 2009 JASAL article "Something to Keep You Steady". Patrick White's relationship to late modernity is examined in "The Solid Mandala and Patrick White's Late Modernity" in Transnational Literature, November 2011. Other work of mine on Gerald Murnane's recent fiction is to be found in my reviews of A History of Books in Antipodes and Southerly, both published in 2013. More on Stead's For Love Alone is to be found in my article in the first issue of the Chinese Journal of Australian Cultural Studies, edited by Wang Guanglin of Songjiang University in Shanghai. Shirley Hazzard's United Nations short stories, mentioned with respect to Frank Moorhouse in Chapter 7, are examined in my essay in Shirley Hazzard: New Critical Essays, Contemporary Australian Literature x xi communication are among them, as well as, necessarily, the greater viability of democratic institutions in the post-Cold War world. Stephen Greenblatt wisely urges us to avoid a "sentimental pessimism" that "collapses everything into a global vision of domination and subjection". 1 But, like all periods of history, the current one involves forms of injustice and dogma that writers must defy, evade or circumvent. The assumption behind this book is that writers always have to struggle against their cultural context, or, in Greenblatt's words, to "make imaginative adaptations" in their work, no matter their manifest cultural position or the apparent benignity of the ruling forces. 2 This era's writers have a unique challenge, and this book tells the story of how, in Australia, they have responded to this challenge. I am not saying that these are the only contemporary Australian writers who can provide this testimony, nor that those Australian writers who cannot be read in this way are either not worth reading or not of aesthetic value. This book offers one map of what is going on today; other critics would draw other maps. Furthermore, Australian literature is different from that of the UK and USA in that it has never had a set canon. As important as figures such as Henry Lawson, Judith Wright, Patrick White and Peter Carey have been, the reader who does not wish to engage with these writers has always been able to navigate around them. In turn, no one person can read all of Australian literature or be conversant with its full range: it is too large and too diverse for that. Australian poetry has had more of a set canon than Australian fiction-certainly in the mid-twentieth century no anthology of Australian poetry could exclude Kenneth Slessor, David Campbell or R. D. Fitzgeraldbut today of those three only Slessor still plays a central role in the national literary conversation. The fortunes of Adam Lindsay Gordon-the Australian poet in the nineteenth century, but ranked below his contemporaries Charles Harpur and Henry Kendall by the late twentieth century-testify to the openness of the Australian canon, an openness that has only increased as Indigenous, migrant and expatriate writers, as well as those working in languages other than English, have more recently stretched the very definition of what it is to be Australian. Meanwhile, the contemporary availability of digital and print-on-demand technologies has expanded the mathematical possibility of what can be canonical and, along with a more tolerant cultural agenda, has meant we have more books to choose from than ever before. Australian literature, because of its traditional pluralisms, is well equipped to handle this new contingency. I attribute part of this to the fact that Australia has had no single dominant metropolitan area. Whereas London and New York have defined British and American literature far more than any other city in those countries, Sydney and Melbourne have kept up with each other, while Perth and Brisbane have held their own in a smaller compass. Canberra plays a key role in this book, not just as site of much of its composition (while I was a visiting fellow at the Canberra campus of the University of New South Wales), but as a potential ground of re-emergent Australian idealism-reflecting the fact that there is no single metropolitan space for the artificially built national capital to rival. The plurality of Australian literature is its great joy, and one of the qualities that enable it to be resilient against the threats to the imagination with which this book is so concerned.
‘Patronised servants’: Australian scientists in the 1940s
This paper seeks to probe politically engaged Australian scientists who were prepared to desert their ivory towers, exchange the laboratory for the soapbox and assume social responsibility during the swiftly changing political environment of the 1940s. It will examine these scientists through the lens of the Australian Association of Scientific Workers (AASW), which vigorously resisted the push for science to serve the needs of the state and, equally robustly, defended the long-held but increasingly besieged tradition of social responsibility in science. The paper will examine this tradition: that science was not an endeavour that occurred in isolation, but was – and should be – influenced by society. In assessing whether the goals pursued by AASW scientists altered during the early Cold War, or whether they remained largely consistent with pre-war and wartime goals, the paper will argue that the AASW was ill-prepared for, and overwhelmed by, the speed with which Cold War anti-communism moved from the margins to the mainstream of social and political life. Phillip Deery and Lachlan Clohesy, '‘Patronised servants’: Australian scientists in the 1940s', Journal of the Royal Australian Historical Society, vol. 99, no. 2, December 2013, pp. 114-32.
Climate Change Narratives in Australian Fiction
2014
Several major Australian novels about climate change imagine a warmed planet. This is a timely survey of these cautionary tales. There is also a long tradition of Australians, settlers and Indigenous people, writing about the land and the sea, and about how our climate shapes our communities and our future, and about how colonisation and industrialisation too often destroys our environment. This outline begins to locate, question and frame the insights of many past and present Australian authors about changing climatic conditions.