… wandering souls and war poetry

The  Operation Wandering Souls project is one of the projects undertaken by  The Australian Centre for the Study of Armed Conflict and Society (ACSACS). Its aim is to help the people of Vietnam locate the remains of those of their soldiers who died in combat against Australian and New Zealand forces during the Vietnam War. It also aims to return to Vietnamese families documents and other items of a personal nature that were ‘liberated’ from the bodies of Viet Cong or People’s Army soldiers.

One item recently found and returned is a poem written by a young Viet Cong guerilla that has been in the possession of an Australian soldier since he left Vietnam.  Both men’s stories, and a transcript of the poem can be found here.

Operation Wandering Souls  has a database showing the locations of the battles and burial sites in Vietnam where Australians were involved.  This data has been plotted on Google Earth images and burial sites can now be located in relation to today’s land use. This can be viewed either in the Library as part of our current exhibition (April 18th to May 20th) or can be downloaded as a pdf from the ‘Operation Wandering Souls‘ webpage.

For those interested in further reading the Library has an extensive collection of war writings from all conflicts.  The following are some poetry collections which contain the writings of men and women who served in Vietnam.

Homecoming: images of Vietnam

Dien Cai Dau 

Obscenities

Lost in America

The awkward silence

Just for laughs

Carrying the darkness : the poetry of the Vietnam war

Collection Spotlight – Colonial Art

Did you know that within the Academy Library collections you can find books depicting Colonial Art?

‘Discovering Cook’s collections’  edited by Michelle Hetherington and Howard Morphy.

‘Printed images in colonial Australia 1801-1901′ by Roger Butler.

‘Rare & curious : the secret history of Governor Macquarie’s collectors’ chest’ by Elizabeth Ellis.

‘John Gould : in Australia : letters and drawings with a catalogue of manuscripts, correspondence and drawings relating to the birds and mammals of Australia held in the Natural History Museum, London’ by Ann Datta.

‘First views of Australia 1788-1825 : a history of early Sydney’  [compiled by] Tim McCormick … [et al.] ; foreword by Bernard Smith.

‘Images of Australia : a history of Australian children’s literature 1941-1970′ by Maurice Saxby.

‘Picturesque pursuits : colonial women artists & the amateur tradition’ by Caroline Jordan.

A great new online resource is also now available through the State Library of NSW and is well worth exploring. Entitled ‘Lewin Wild Art Exhibition’  , this resource allows you to view over 150 images of the Colonial artist John Lewin’s work along with information about the print.

The Picture Australia website also has a great collection of Colonial Artworks that you can view online.

Image source: State Library of NSW

Travelling the centuries, literature, violence and aesthetics

 The English Program Research Seminar today had my mind ranging from trying to consider the demonic Gothic overtones of Lolita; not something I confess I’d previously imagined doing, to the development of war literature from memoir to the 1st person novel. This talk encompassing developments from the late 18th century, with especial emphasis on two prominent works of the early 19th century, and the change from providing a historical chronology & commentary of a campaign to a romanticised picturesque narrative, demanding reader participation in the form of an emotive response. Overtones of the transformative experience of war, to the purity of the landscape and the unsettling idea of war as travel guide. I was envisioning a sort of precursor to ‘Boys own’ and the novel idea of war narrative as a form of ‘The Grand Tour’. It was a very difficult jump from the Regency to Australia & the Howard years post 9/11 and a pity that the last paper had to be abridged just as my mind was starting to adjust to the time change.

From the Academy Library: Lolita  / Vladimir Nabokov. Recollections of the Peninsula /  Moyle Sherer. The unknown terrorist / Richard Flanagan.

Todays Speakers:
Dr Paul Sheehan, Macquarie University  “Demonic Temptations:  Art and Cruelty in the Postwar Novel”
Dr Neil Ramsey, The University of Western Sydney “A School of Piety and True Devotion’: The Military Picturesque and the Building of War”
Michael Austin, UNSW Canberra “State of exception in recent Australian fiction“

World Poetry Day – 21st of March

The UN has set aside the 21st of March as World Poetry Day.

 This is a day to reflect on the importance of poetry and poets in our world.

“Poets convey a timeless message. They are often key witnesses to history’s great political and social changes. Their writings inspire us to build lasting peace in our minds, to rethink relations between man and nature and to establish humanism founded on the uniqueness and diversity of people’s.”  Irina Bokova, Director-General of UNESCO, message for World Poetry Day, 21 March 2011

Within the Academy Library you will find an extensive poetry collection  including international and many Australian poets that you might like to look at. These are located in the PR sections of the library.

 We also have access to many online resources and poetry journals, such as   ‘Southerly’, ‘ Meanjin’  ‘Poetry’, ‘Poetrybay’ and ‘Poets and Writers’

A great website to check out is the ‘Australian Poetry library‘. It has many poems and biographies of poets.

Banning the book

The Censor’s Library by Nicole Moore.

The Censor’s Library is the first comprehensive examination of Australian book censorship, based around the author’s discovery of the secret ‘censor’s library’ in the National Archive. As it has for much of Australia’s history, censorship continues to attract heated debate, from the Henson affair to the national internet feed. But federal publications censorship has been a largely secret affair for most of the century, deliberately kept from the knowledge of the public. The Censor’s Library is a provocative account of this scandalous history. Combining scholarship with the narrative tension of a thriller, Nicole Moore exposes the secret history of censorship in Australia. –Publisher

This history of censorship in Australia has been recommended for purchase for the Academy Library. To recommend books for purchase for the Academy Library a form is available from the Library’s home page under How do I? The direct link is : http://lib.unsw.adfa.edu.au/forms/purchase.html

Check out an ABC interview with Nicole Moore here.

On a similar theme …The deadline for call for papers for the 5th annual Conference of the Australasian Association for Literature entitled Literature and Censorship is coming up on April 6th 2012. The Conference is being held here at UNSW Canberra this year. The link to the conference website is available here: http://www.aal.asn.au/conference/2012/call-for-papers/index.shtml