Handwriting, as a means of personal expression, communication and creativity, is a fast diminishing skill and mode of expression. This dialogue between Paul Weston, a forensic expert in handwriting, and Gary Crew, a Professor of Creative Writing and established author, attempts to establish the necessity for the continued use of handwriting in all forms of human communication. ‘MS found: a meditation’ is a fictocritical short story alluding to R.L. Stevenson’s Essays in the Art of Handwriting (1905) and E.A. Poe’s ‘MS Found in a Bottle’ (1833). The story celebrates the longevity of handwriting and the handwritten document. It predicts the loss of elements of written creative expression if recording by hand, rather than computer or other IT mechanisms, becomes obsolete.

David Malouf's novel Remembering Babylon did not, like Athena, spring fully formed from the head of Zeus. It is equally doubtful that the novel was inspired by some mystic muse. Malouf seems to have employed the scholarly methodology of practice-led research to write Remembering Babylon, gathering information from historical and literary sources, selecting and rejecting specific elements from these sources, then subjecting what he had chosen to his creative imagination. In the afterword, Malouf acknowledges the historical Gemmy Morrell's name and his actual words as the ‘seed of this fiction’ but ‘otherwise this novel has no origin in fact.' This article will investigate specific citations included by the author and reflect on their relationship to imaginings of ‘nature.' The selections will be chosen because of their particular resonance with the human–nature relationship. While the post-colonial implications of the novel are well established, the exploration of the unusual citation inclusions and exclusions extends understanding of another preoccupation within the work's creative construction: an explicit focus on human relationships with the natural world. The attitude to nature in Remembering Babylon can be read eco-critically as establishing the impossibility of eco-poiesis, enacting Kate Rigby's notion that the literary text can ‘save the earth by disclosing the non-equation of the word and thing, poem and place'. In this sense, Remembering Babylon is a transcendent act of eco-critical world-making, not because it reflects the natural world in mimetic veracity, but because it represents moments of the natural world as beyond language and creates brief moments of human collapse into, and synthesis with, nature.

After Rita left me, I sank into that self indulgent misery where you find yourself listening to song lyrics.Worse, where you find yourself sobbing along with them.You know what I mean?Like, the morning (mourning?) the kid came into my life, I was listening to some hammy tenor warbling on the radio as I drove to uni. (Iu0027d managed to keep the Volvo.) My mother used to sing this: Thomas Mooreu0027s classic weepy, The Last Rose of Summer. I should have flicked it off but as I have suggested, I was in the mood for tears. u0027Who would inhabit this bleak world alone?u0027 the tremulous tenor wanted to know. Oozing sentiment though the line was, how could I not share his woes?Thereu0027s a certain ecstasy in the misery of the loveless.Later, alone in my office-and being in that sort of mood- I looked up the meaning of u0027sentimentu0027: u0027a tendency to be swayed by feeling rather than reasonu0027. Thatu0027s nice, I thought. I can go with that.Mooreu0027s lyrics were written in 1805, pre-empting the Victorians in their relish for woe. Having spotted the last rose of the summer-not even a contesting bud is nigh-the poet conscientiously cuts and dismembers it, scattering the leaves (what happened to the petals?) among its u0027scentless and deadu0027 companions while citing the blunt valediction, u0027Go sleep thou with themu0027.Why should a thing so lovely be thus condemned?The lyricist summarily explains:When true hearts lie withered,And fond hearts have flown,Oh! Who would inhabitThis bleak world alone?So, the poet reasoned, if youu0027re alone and miserable, make sure everyone else is too, or possibly-even preferably-youu0027re better off dead. On the strength of that, I turned to my window.Below me stretched acres of tree-dotted university lawns, littered with languorous youth, all snogging and snuggling like there was no tomorrow and my bleak muse Keats (having sneaked up behind me, uninvited), whispered: Fair youth, beneath the trees; thou canst not leave they song, nor ever can those trees be bare. So doth Eternity tease... Ha! I sniffed, jabbing an elbow into his ribs, what lies were told by your precious Grecian urn? And pulling myself together, I went for a coffee.Rita or no Rita, I could still afford that miserable pleasure.With an hour to kill (I was seeing some undergrad plagiarist at 10:00), I cribbed a quiet corner in the refectory and slumped, wallowing in the maudlin memories of my own withered love.I was going down for the third time when a yabbering mob of teenagers descended. One glance at their uniforms and I knew they were from a neighbouring high school. I shuddered as they hugged and punched (is there a difference?) until finally some tight-skirted teacher made an attempt to bring them to order.I pushed my coffee aside, intending to leave, when out of the crowd that same teacher reappeared (her skirt hitched, her chignon in disarray). Hissing into a studentu0027s ear, she propelled him towards my sanctuary. I had enough problems without watching somebody else victimised so I reached for my books, but something in this kidu0027s face made me stop and look again.He was me. I saw myself there, a kid, sitting alone: first day, first year: same uni, same corner of the refectory. Smart as (quiz master smart) but dumb as. And lonely as. Like this kid I had the body of a young Frank Sinatra (yeah, Iu0027m that old...) but not much else, other than zits - and raging hormones. Oh, and jeans turned up because they were too long and my mother said Iu0027m not cutting them off because you might still grow (Ha!) and there were girls. …

By Sandra Burr, Donna Lee Brien & 18 more. 20 new works which show, perhaps, that creative writing academics are understanding better what it is they are supposed to be doing for the government that funds them?

For Strange Objects, I quite deliberately set out to find an episode in Australian history that dealt with a teenager being isolated. I was eager to establish this ‘teen loner’ element as a form of rapport with my young readers, yet re-interpret the teen genre at the same time. As a result, I wrote in the journal that I had begun keeping for my new novel: I would like to trace the life of a boy left entirely alone in Australia before settlement. I think this would be like leaving me alone on Mars. While there would be a drive for ‘physical survival’, there would also be a need for ‘psychic survival’ - how to adjust, cope, grow through loss… I then went looking for my seminal historical episode involving a castaway youth. Image: Public Domain (State Library of Queensland). https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:StateLibQld_1_103421_County_of_Anglesea_(ship).jpg