Brigitta Olubas

Bronwyn Oliver: Strange things by Hannah Fink

May 2018, no. 401

Almost twelve years after her death, Bronwyn Oliver (1959–2006) remains one of Australia’s best-known sculptors; her artistic legacy supported by the prolific outputs of an intense and high-profile studio practice across three decades, by public, private, and corporate commissions, and by a string of prizes, awards, and fellowships ...

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Elizabeth Harrower: Critical essays by Elizabeth McMahon and Brigitta Olubas

by Susan Sheridan •

March 2018, no. 399

Susan Sheridan reviews 'Elizabeth Harrower: Critical essays' edited by Elizabeth McMahon and Brigitta Olubas

The appearance in 2014 of In Certain Circles, a new novel from Elizabeth Harrower, was an important literary event. The author, who still lives in Sydney, had published nothing since 1966 and had repeatedly maintained that she had nothing more to say. In Certain Circles had been ready for publication in 1971 ...

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Shirley Hazzard: New Critical Essays edited by Brigitta Olubas

by Brenda Walker •

April 2015, no. 370

Brenda Walker reviews 'Shirley Hazzard' edited by Brigitta Olubas

Shirley Hazzard is probably the most elegantly polished writer in the Australian canon: her novels and stories use traditional structures with great assurance, she writes from a thoughtful moral position, she is outspokenly engaged with the fine and the less fine elements of the Australia she once lived in, and she can be dry and funny. She spent most of her life in ...

Australian Literary Studies, Vol. 28, no. 1-2 edited by Leigh Dale and Tanya Dalziell

by Brigitta Olubas •

September 2014, no. 364

This is a thoughtful and timely issue of Australian Literary Studies (ALS), one of Australia’s most substantial scholarly journals. It brings together scholars from institutions across Australia, India, and New Zealand to reflect on the state of the discipline of English in the context of a number of recent upheavals, including those directly relating to print media, including literature, which many would consider the traditional focus and matter of English. It also includes shifts in cultural literacy in the Internet age: changes in the nature of reading and the places and ways readers read; changes in school curricula; changes in the higher education sector – in response partly to changes in literacy and school education and to a rise in vocational training at both levels; to the rise of the corporate university; and to developments over the past several decades that we might think of as internal to the discipline: the critiques of syllabi and reading practices focused on canonical texts; the rise of theory; of post-colonial and feminist and minority discourse approaches; of interdisciplinary reading, and so on. The contributors to this volume address these questions in terms of debates around ‘the public humanities’: that is, defences of the traditional humanities by scholars from literary studies along with philosophers and historians in the face of attacks from the political and corporate world about the ‘relevance’ of these fields of inquiry.

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Shirley Hazzard: Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist by Brigitta Olubas

by Paul Morgan •

June 2013, no. 352

Paul Morgan reviews 'Shirley Hazzard: Literary Expatriate and Cosmopolitan Humanist' by Brigitta Olubas

The cover of Shirley Hazzard’s The Great Fire shows a vast and terrible conflagration. Flames reach high into the sky, devouring the air and seeming to set the wide river alight. In the distance, an eerily familiar pair of ghostly towers rises above the smoke. In the foreground, tiny human figures move around as a boat sets off towards the fire, perhaps in some desperate attempt at rescue. The painting is The Burning of the Houses of Parliament by J.M.W. Turner. Shirley Hazzard chose this image herself for the cover of the novel, which won both the Miles Franklin and National Book Awards in 2003.

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Broomstick: Personal Reflections of Leonie Kramer by Leonie Kramer

by Brigitta Olubas •

November 2012, no. 346

Brigitta Olubas reviews 'Broomstick: Personal reflections of Leonie Kramer' by Leonie Kramer

Broomstick: Personal Reflections of Leonie Kramer has been some years in the writing, and is published now only with the assistance of Leonie Kramer’s friends, former colleagues, and daughters, with the delay ultimately due, the Preface informs us, to the progression of the author’s dementia. As the memoir of a very public figure whose name and decisive actions marked the national fields of broadcasting, the academy, and corporate boardrooms across the final decades of the last century, Broomstick might have promised to be of interest both to general readers and to social or cultural historians. And as the memoir of one of Australia’s most outspoken, even infamous conservatives, it might also have been expected to provoke some controversy, to reopen debates perhaps, to antagonise, or to consolidate and confirm positions and views.

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Patrick White within the Western Literary Tradition by John Beston & Remembering Patrick White edited by Elizabeth McMahon and Brigitta Olubas

by Charles Lock •

April 2011, no. 330

That Patrick White is thought of as an Australian writer is, though regrettable, undeniable. Two problems follow: the first being that he tends to be presented by his critical custodians in an almost comically restricted way, as though White’s works needed to be measured and justified only by Australian standards and terms of comparison ...

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‘In more than one place’

by Brigitta Olubas •

April 2010, no 320

In October 2009, Shirley Hazzard spoke at the New York launch of the Macquarie PEN Anthology of Australian Literature. Hazzard read from People in Glass Houses, her early collection of satirical stories about the UN bureaucracy. Her appearance serves to remind Australian readers that Hazzard continues to occupy a defining, if somewhat attenuated, place within the expansive field of what Nicholas Jose described in 2008, on taking up the annual Harvard Chair of Australian Studies, as ‘writing that engage[s] us with the international arena from the Australian perspective’. Jose went on to cite Hazzard’s most recent novel, The Great Fire (2003), as part of ‘a range of material which Americans would not necessarily think of as Australian’.

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