The curriculum has been fundamentally challenged by First Nations writers in three main ways. First is the proliferation of acclaimed fiction, poetry and drama written and performed by First Nations writers, which has become integral to curricula and the has taken root in the wider Australian imaginary. Second is the increasing presence of First Nations scholars in the literary-critical field who critique inherited practices, the values of the accepted canon, and provide diverse modes of reading and analysis. Third – and no doubt problematically – is the identification with Indigenous ontologies through the crises of the Anthropocene, which has expanded the range of courses that include First Nations literatures.Of critical importance to these transformations is the engagement of the international community including its readers and critics. The connections between First Nations communities across the globe are also vital to these processes. Closest to home, the connections within Oceania and the Pacific are driving change and a comparison of Australia with New Zealand is revealing. For while the formation of New Zealand’s literary institutions occurred later than those of Australia, their decolonization has accelerated faster and more surely. This chapter will include a comparison of these two contexts and their related projects of decolonizing literary studies.

This essay looks at works by the Booker Prize-winning authors Peter Carey and Richard Flanagan, with reference to other internationally acclaimed Australian writers including Kate Grenville and Alexis Wright, to consider the ambiguous position of Australian literature in the evolving discourse of the Global South. Despite its emphatically southern location, Australia is usually classified as part of the Global North, based on various economic measures, and with the shift away from postcolonialism to a decolonial understanding of invasion as ‘a structure, not an event’ in settler societies, critics increasingly question whether writers of Australia’s white settler majority are ‘writing back’ to a dominant culture or writing from within one. Yet numerous critics have found it difficult to dissociate the land ‘down under’ from underdog status, and some identify Carey and Flanagan as writers of the Global South. They are aided in this by the historical settings of these authors’ best-known novels, which foreground past hardships endured by groups whose present-day descendants are typically much better placed. Ultimately, rather than seeking to place the Australian novel in relation to the Global South, this essay finds ‘the Global South’ and ‘the Australian novel’ to be mutually destabilising terms.

‘Vitalities’ describes the creative-destructive energies of the globalised harbour city with its geographically sprawling, culturally diverse suburban mosaic. Yet as ground zero of British invasion in 1788, Sydney is also ‘haunted’. Dispossessive colonisation ghosts not only its colonial archive but can be glimpsed in the city’s landforms and topography. ‘Haunted vitalities’ recur in settler, sojourner and migrant writings that thematize Sydney Harbour’s vertical sublime and the city’s horizontal suburban sprawl. Working from the interwar period to the present, this chapter reads settler texts about Sydney alongside texts by First Nations people. Beyond interwar, harbour-centric works– Christina Stead’s Seven Poor Men of Sydney (1934), Kenneth Slessor’s elegiac poem ‘Five Bells’ (1939) and Eleanor Dark’s novel Waterway (1938)– the spatial frame is widened to Greater Metropolitan Sydney, moving from Eleanor Dark’s reimagining of British invasion in The Timeless Land (1941), to Ruby Langford Ginibi’s memoir Don’t Take Your Love to Town (1988) and Julie Janson’s novel Benevolence (2020). With Gail Jones’s Five Bells (2011), the chapter returns to the harbour to consider how this contemporary novel not only reckons with Sydney’s settler-colonial past through a world literary frame but also attends to the presence and voice of First Nations people.

“The Cambridge Companion to the Australian Novel provides a clear, lively, and accessible account of the novel in Australia. The chapters of this book survey significant issues and developments in the Australian novel, offer historical and conceptual frameworks, and demonstrate what reading an Australian novel looks like in practice.”

The countries of Australasia, from the continent of Australia to the many small island nations of the Pacific, were colonised by European imaginations as places of strangeness or paradisiacal wonder. Those fantasies stand in stark contrast to the brute realities of colonialism. This chapter examines how Australasian magical realist literature ironises and destabilizes the 'beautiful lies' of colonialism. This chapter's overview is focused on Australia and Aotearoa/New Zealand, where the circumstances of colonisation encouraged dominant traditions of fiction writing. However, the chapter also recognises how magical realist literature from Australasia engages traditional forms of storytelling to rupture the hegemonies of empire. Indeed, Indigenous authors have been significant contributors to Australasian magical realist writing, which ironises and destabilizes the 'beautiful lies' of colonial history to represent experiences of trauma and dispossession, but also to assert a dynamic and polysemous sense of survival embodied in the dynamic and polysemous nature of magical realist fiction itself.