Abstract: This article examines three poems by contemporary Australian poets that use the lyric poem's complex relationship with time to grapple with experiences of disruption, erasure and loss in relation to rented housing. Renting—once primarily a form of transitional housing, now frequently a longer-term form of housing for increasing portions of the Australian population—has been widely discussed in the context of Australia's worsening housing crisis, but the ways in which Australian poets are responding to this crisis in their work has received little attention from literary scholars. I analyze three poems by established and emerging Australian poets whose recent work grapples with experiences of unsettled dwelling across a variety of geographical positions and forms of housing tenure: Queensland poet Zenobia Frost's book After the Demolition ; West Australian poet Tracy Ryan's collection Rose Interior ; and Victorian poet Harry Reid's debut collection, Leave Me Alone . I explore the lyric's unstable relationship with time and the ways in which each poet deploys this complex temporality to address a series of unsettled and unsettling experiences with attempts to construct or preserve a sense of home in rented houses.
Abstract: This article argues that, despite widespread acclaim, the significance of Peter Carey's early short story publications is still underappreciated. Through exploring the ways in which the powerfully imagined but critically neglected Carey short story "Exotic Pleasures" (1979) uses the template of alien invasion pioneered by H.G. Wells in The War of the Worlds to critique imperialism and colonialism in Australia, I show why critical analysis of this story illuminates the enduring importance of Carey's science fiction short stories. Through close reading, the article shows how the story's aesthetics deliver its political and emotional impact and that its use of telling detail anchors the story's critique to the Australian environment and economy in ways previously unrecognized by critics.
