Julieanne Lamond. Lohrey: Melbourne University Press, 2022. Contemporary Australian Writers. 173 pages. AU$29.99. ISBN: 9780522878936

Emma Maguire reviews Julieanne Lamond's Lohrey (2022)

More Than a Murder Mystery: Savage River is a Gripping New Take on the Australian Gothic

[Extract] Newly released from prison for a murder she committed in her teens, Miki Anderson (Katherine Langford) has returned to her home town Savage River. She is determined to leave the past behind her, but when another murder occurs just days after Miki returns, the town’s mistrust deepens

Kokomo by Victoria Hannan: a millennial fiction that spans generations

[Extract] Victoria Hannan’s Kokomo – which won last year’s Victorian Premier’s Literary Award for an unpublished manuscript – is a novel about loss, exile, homecoming, family and, above all, love. When Mina leaves her life in London and rushes home to Melbourne because her agoraphobic mother has finally left the house, she begins to realise that her idea of the past is based, like the Beach Boys’ imagining of Kokomo, on a profound misconception

New Aussie Drama Bad Behaviour Gives Us A Complex Portrayal of Girlhood and Queer Stories

[Extract] Bad Behaviour is a gritty, intense psychological drama that follows the haunting teenage experience of now 20-something Joanna Mackenzie (Jana McKinnon), who revisits the year she spent on scholarship at Silver Creek

Home, about, shop, contact: constructing an authorial persona via the author website

The same integration of digital spaces and platforms into daily life that is prompting the development of new tools in autobiography studies—which P. David Marshall has described as "the proliferation of the public self"—has also given rise to the field of persona studies, which addresses the ways in which individuals engage in practices of self-presentation in order to form commoditised identities that circulate in affective communities (Marshall 163). To the field of persona studies, this essay contributes an approach to the author website as a site of self-presentation that works to "package" an authorial persona for circulation within contemporary literary marketplaces. Significantly, I address these websites not as direct representations of a pre-existing self, but as automedial texts that need to be read and interpreted, and which work to construct the authorial self or persona. I draw on theories of authorship to propose the "author website" as a genre of automedial representation that creates authorial personas for public consumption. Specifically, I consider the website of Erika Moen—a young, female author working in the medium of autobiographical comics—as a case study in order to explore the tensions between Moen's authorial self (as produced in the digital elements of erikamoen.com) and the other, more deliberately autobiographical, renderings of her self that appear in her comics. Although young cartoonists tend to position themselves as artists rather than authors, the recent academic and critical interest in the "graphic novel" form has resulted in a growing sense of these works as literary and their makers as authors. In thinking through this distinction, Andrew Bennett's suggestion that "asking 'what is an author?' is intimately related to the question 'what is literature?'" (118) points to why cartoonists, whose texts are part image and part text and only sometimes bound up as books, have not always been contextualised as authors

Ways of seeing sex

Sex museums exist all over the world as tourist attractions. They are veritable caches of erotic art and objects, sites for sex education, playgrounds for the absurd, and keepers of the histories of sex. This essay contemplates the female gaze in sex museums

Young women won’t be told how to behave, but is #girlboss just deportment by another name?

[Extract] In today’s terms, June Dally-Watkins was Australia’s OG (original gangster) #girlboss. The illegitimate child of a single mother, Dally-Watkins came from humble rural beginnings and found fame as a young model in 1950s Sydney. She turned this fame into a fortune, using her profile to start a chain of finishing and deportment schools for young women and, later, young men. Dally-Watkins’ schools, which still operate today, taught catwalk strutting, posing for photographs, and make-up application. She taught models how to win beauty pageants and taught men how to court like gentlemen. And she made a lot of money doing it. Dally-Watkins died earlier this week, and is being remembered as a strict yet charming teacher and a very successful businesswoman. The legacy of Dally-Watkins and what she symbolises as a successful and feminine woman presents an opportunity to think through some of the ways our culture both applauds and maligns women’s success

Girls, Autobiography, Media: gender and self-mediation in digital economies

This book investigates how girls' automedial selves are constituted and consumed as literary or media products in a digital landscape dominated by intimate, though quite public, modes of self-disclosure and pervaded by broader practices of self-branding. In thinking about how girlhood as a potentially vulnerable subject position circulates as a commodity, Girls, Autobiography, Media argues that by using digital technologies to write themselves into culture, girls and young women are staking a claim on public space and asserting the right to create and distribute their own representations of girlhood. Their texts—in the form of blogs, vlogs, photo-sharing platforms, online diaries and fangirl identities—show how they navigate the sometimes hostile conditions of online spaces in order to become narrators of their own lives and stories. By examining case studies across different digital forms of self-presentation by girls and young women, this book considers how mediation and autobiographical practices are deeply interlinked, and it highlights the significant contribution girls and young women have made to contemporary digital forms of life narrative

Reality slippages and narcissistic stereotyping - watching Content, a TV show made for smart phones

Content, the new series from ABC, derives humour from the intersections and misalignments of online life and reality, but it goes one step further: it’s the first show set entirely on an iPhone screen. Filmed vertically, Content is built to watch on your phone, and the narrative unfolds through messages, FaceTime calls, and whatever Lucy’s phone sees when she opens her camera (including the selfies she’ll delete later). This article considers how the show constructs the youthful femininity of its young protagonist and how it reflects the traps of the attention economy amid the rise of the smartphone as an entertainment medium

Constructing the “Instagirl,” deconstructing the self-brand: Amalia Ulman’s Instagram hoax

Amalia Ulman is an Argentinian-born Spanish artist who used Instagram as a platform for an art piece titled Excellences & Perfections in which she used images of herself to portray a fictional character whose story unfolded over several months. Her images, replicating popular tropes of digital autobiographical performance were presented and widely read as 'authentic' selfies. This essay examines how Ulman’s performance piece can be understood as an autobiographical mediation that uses networked photo-sharing practices to investigate feminine embodiment and self-representation, and how self-branding in digital media is gendered