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This article explores the emergence of life writing in Australia as a response to social and political issues. It focuses on themes such as refugee and asylum seeker policy, gendered abuse, racial discrimination, and climate change. The works of authors Behrouz Boochani, Stephanie Wood, and Ginger Gorman are highlighted as they use life writing to shed light on these issues and challenge stereotypes. The article also discusses two anthologies, "Growing Up African" and "Growing Up Queer," which aim to share diverse narratives and challenge the silence and marginalization experienced by these groups in Australian society. Additionally, the text explores the intersection of writing and the environment, particularly in response to the bushfires in Australia, and emphasizes the importance of life writing as a form of activism and personal storytelling for social justice and reparation. [Extracted from the article]

This paper will examine the effects of exile in life writing practice. It will consider how things from the past can be used to evoke and revoke what James Wood termed 'homelooseness'. It will draw on examples from my own creative practice, a family memoir written from Australia about people in and from the United Kingdom. The memoir is informed by things plucked from a loose and disordered family archive, which exists across both countries. It is driven by a need to locate my own life within its new context in the Asia-Pacific. In the paper I will use the work of W.G. Sebald and Penelope Lively to illustrate the rootlessness things provoke and resist; I will touch on the melancholy inspired by that feeling. As well as showing the reality of dislocation, things-from-the-past can be useful tools for life writers concerned with the past or engaged with the problem of trying to capture slippery, liminal states of being. The conflation of one place or time with another, as described by George Poulet when critiquing Marcel Proust, can be triggered briefly by objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historians acknowledge that since the 1970s family history research has driven individuals to confront the silences within Australia's colonial past, including 'the convict stain'. However, little attention is given to how the practice has been used by the Stolen Generations to deal with the fracturing impact of 'protectionist' social policies on family and life histories. To explore this, I bring the concept of the intergenerational self into dialogue with 'Paul's Story', a short memoir collected in Carmel Bird's The Stolen Children: Their Stories (1998), and singer/songwriter Archie Roach's testimony from the ABC Blackout television documentary 'Best Kept Secret' (1991). In these cases, the narrative continuity of family lines is severed. Faced with lost origins, the authors must reclaim an intergenerational self retrospectively through research and revision. The paper examines these cases in the context of an emerging focus on relational lives. It demonstrates how people write and tell family histories to rebuild an intergenerational identity in the wake of destructive colonial policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'Locating Lives' conference in Adelaide in December 2015 included two off-campus expeditions in its programme: a visit to the Adelaide Migration Museum, and a beach walk to Glenelg. Given the unique oceanic imaginary attached to the Asia Pacific region, museums, beaches and boats are key sites for locating life narratives here. A series of life narratives that feature memories of child migration to Australia in the early sixties are featured here: Jimmy Barnes' memoir Working Class Boy; the testimonies in the 'On Their Own - Britain's Child Migrants' exhibition that has featured in migration museums in Britain and Australia; Joe Sacco's essay 'The Unwanted'; and my own recollections as a British child migrant. Late last century, a turn to 'human rights museology' and 'history from below' facilitated new migration museums and exhibition spaces such as the Adelaide Migration Museum, that are open to personal testimony and artefacts that locate lives more intimately and experientially. On display, artefacts become evocative objects open to multiple stories of migration, both past and present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The field diaries of John Bray, Bessie Mountford and Margaret McArthur are important first-person accounts of the social dynamics within the 1948 American-Australian Scientific Expedition to Arnhem Land. This article explores the ways in which representations of self and others in the diaries, particularly in relation to food, illuminate the gendered and class-based politics of the expedition's group from the perspectives of participants on the margins of the group's power structures. Although the focus of the expedition was on increasing knowledge about the Aboriginal cultures of Arnhem Land, it is the nuances of post-war non-Indigenous Australian class and gender relationships which are most vividly illuminated in the diaries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the 2008 literary anthologyGrowing up Asian in Australia, edited by the young Australian writer and award-winning memoirist, Alice Pung. Featuring a collection of auto/biographically based prose, poetry, and comics by “Asian-Australian” authors, each short text within the anthology focuses on coming-of-age in modern-day Australia. Informed by auto/biography and Asian-Australian studies, this paper explores the cultural work that Pung's anthology aims to do. Through a reading of the anthology's paratexts as well as the short, individual childhood autobiographies, the discussion considers the strategies Pung employs in order to attract a broad readership, and how the anthology mobilizes life narratives of childhood to intervene in debates about Australian national, local, and personal identities at the start of the twenty-first century. I argue that Pung's text skillfully balances politics and populism, critiquing fundamental issues of national identity and self-representation while simultaneously appealing to a broad readership. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Military biography in Australia raises questions about the specific historiography more generally, and about the commemorative and celebratory tendencies in Australian military writing. Recent advances in the field illustrate the continuing tensions within the writing of military history in Australia, and reflect some of the same tendencies elsewhere in the English-speaking world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]