Australian Voices

Contemporary Australian fiction is attracting a world audience, particularly in the United States, where a growing readership eagerly awaits new works. In Australian Voices, Ray Willbanks goes beyond the books to their authors, using sixteen interviews to reveal the state of fiction writing in Australia—what nags from the past, what engages the imagination for the future. Willbanks engages the writers in lively discussions of their own work, as well as topics of collective interest such as the past, including convict times; the nature of the land; the treatment of Aborigines; national identity and national flaws; Australian-British antipathy; sexuality and feminism; drama and film; writing, publishing, and criticism in Australia; and the continuous and pervasive influence of the United States on Australia. The interviews in Australian Voices are gossipy, often funny, and always informative, as Willbanks builds a structured conversation that reveals biography, personality, and significant insight into the works of each writer. They will be important for both scholars and the reading public.

Develops a comprehensive, descriptive, and sociohistorical view of mainstream Australian English and of the social processes that have made it possible for it to become the national language of Australia reaching out into the Asia-Pacific region.

Inverviews with over 100 veterans of the Vietnam War.

Innovative study of the role of language in the 'civilising' project of the British Empire in colonial Australia.

'Finding Queensland in Australian Cinema' explores gender, race and place in selected Australian films in various phases of Australian cinema: from Charles Chauvel’s 'Jedda' (1955), to the ‘period’ films of the New Wave in the 1970s, to the Indigenous filmmakers since the 1990s, and the contemporary era of transnational productions in Australia.

Australia is a big country that needs fine voices to resonate Australia-wide in our ever-changing news industry. The newscasting profession has struggled to overcome a scarcity of training or guidance material on how to use the voice properly to present the news on radio and television. Hence, this book is specifically for Australian newscasters