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Aboriginal Writers and Popular Fiction (2021) The Literature of Anita Heiss

Wiradjuri woman, Anita Heiss, is arguably one of the first Aboriginal Australian authors of popular fiction. A focus on the political characterises her chick lit; and her identity as an author is both supplemented and complemented by her roles as an academic, activist and public intellectual. Heiss has discussed genre as a means of targeting audiences that may be less engaged with Indigenous affairs, and positions her novels as educative but not didactic. Her readership is constituted by committed readers of romance and chick lit as well as politically engaged readers that are attracted to Heiss' dual authorial persona; and, both groups bring radically distinct expectations to bear on these texts. Through analysis of online reviews and surveys conducted with users of the book reviewing website Goodreads, I complicate the understanding of genre as a cogent interpretative frame, and deploy this discussion to explore the social significance of Heiss' literature.

Black Thursday and Other Lost Australian Bushfire Stories (2021)

In these stories of a quintessential Australian phenomenon, bushfires reveal a conflagration of human drama; of tragic love, rage, betryal, endurance, and happiness postponed. And a good horse and a faithful dog prove themselves the best allies in a dangerous situation. The collection has an introduction by Dr Fiannuala Morgan, a lecturer in the Faculty of Arts, Publishing and Communications at The University of Melbourne and the author of Aboriginal Writers and Popular Fiction: The Literature of Anita Heiss from Cambridge University Press. To Be Continued is an Australian Research Council funded project, led by Professor Katherine Bode, that has unearthed an astonishing bibliographic index and full-text archive of fiction in Australian newspapers from 1803 to 1955.

Podcast episode "Bushfires" from podcast "To Be Continued" (2023)

This episode...