This issue of the Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia (JEASA) is a general issue. Nevertheless, it will be seen that almost all of the articles deal with literary texts. While this indicates the most significant home for Australian Studies in European academic contexts, i.e., in English departments, it should be stressed that the journal welcomes anything related to any aspect of Australian Studies. Indeed, increasingly in European conferences, local academics and postgraduates are presenting papers that range more widely than literary analysis, so it is to be hoped that more of this material will find its way into the journal in future. Moreover, while based in Europe, the Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia accepts submissions from anywhere, as can be seen in previous issues.
Issue 3.2 begins with a study of how Indigenous concerns have been taken into account in uranium mining development projects at Ranger (Northern Territory) and Olympic Dam (South Australia), followed by a series of articles dealing with contemporary Australian writers from widely different perspectives. The first of these is a long overdue article on the work of John Mateer, in this case his volume of poems dealing with Portugal, Southern Barbarians, addressed here by his Portuguese translator. Articles on works by the major authors Gail Jones, Alexis Wright, Tim Winton and Christos Tsiolkas appear next, respectively an in-depth examination of one of Gail Jones’s short stories rather than her more studied novels, an argument for Wright’s Plains of Promise as being much more than an early attempt to find the voice that would be so magnificently achieved in Carpentaria, an analysis of the domestic spaces in major texts by Winton in terms of their binary of male presence and female absence, and a suitably abrasive Freudian reading of Tsiolkas’s Dead Europe. Finally, the issue revisits the hoaxes perpetrated by John O’Grady and Helen Darville in terms of another Freudian reading, this time by way of theories of the joke and the unheimlich.
The next issue of JEASA is to be a themed issue on Indigenous marriage, family and kinship in Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand and the Pacific, guest-edited by Vicki Grieves, and containing a mixture of academic articles and autobiographical reflections.
As always, articles on any aspect of Australian studies may be submitted at any time.
Copyright © David Callahan 2012. This text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged.