Issue 1 Contributors
The Plot Thickens: Reading an Interwar Serial Novel
Johanna Wiggers (she/her) is a MPhil student at James Cook University, currently researching representations of modern femininity in the literary context of the Weimar Republic. Her research interests include modernism, middlebrow, and women’s writing, and interwar print culture. She is the co-editor of Exhume alongside Bianca Martin.
Tracing Geraldine Halls
Jane Costessi (she/her) is a University of Adelaide MPhil candidate who is researching the life and work of Geraldine Halls, aka Charlotte Jay. Awarded the Fred Johns Scholarship for Biography, Jane has produced new entries about Halls for the Australian Dictionary of Biography, and Wakefield Companion to South Australian History (2nd Edition, 2024). She also liaised with the State Library of South Australia regarding their acquisition of The Fugitive Eye, a 1961 telemovie (starring Charlton Heston and Fred Astaire) based on a Charlotte Jay novel.
Flesh and Cog: David Ireland’s Bodily Critique of a Systematised World
Neo Xia (he/his) is a PhD candidate at RMIT University. His research areas include science fiction cinema, the film industry, and sci-fi film culture, with a particular focus on topics related to cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk. He has been published in Continuum: Journal of Media & Cultural Studies, Southern Semiotic Review, Somatechnics: Journal of Bodies – Technologies – Power, Cinephile: The University of British Columbia’s Film Journal, and NiTRO + Creative Matters.
Portrait of the Autist Erased
Dr Amanda Tink is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at UniSA Creative, University of South Australia, and Adjunct Research Fellow at Western Sydney University’s Writing and Society Research Centre. She is a proud disabled person with research interests in Australian disabled authors, crip poetics and memoir, and the Nazi genocide of disabled people. Her PhD thesis “Never Towing a Line: Les Murray, Autism, and Australian Literature” details how Murray’s autism and his experiences of being disabled influenced his poetry.
Memory and Manus Island: Reading Refugee Resistance in No Friend but the Mountains
Julia Garas (she/her) did her PhD at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia where she currently works as a sessional academic. Her research areas include contemporary Australian literature and television, national memory, national identity and decolonial theory. She has been published in Limina Journal and is a regular book reviewer for Westerly.
Text and Testimony: Australian #MeToo Memoirs
Bianca Martin (she/her) is a PhD candidate at James Cook University and a previous research fellow with State Library of Queensland. Her research areas include life writing, sexual violence, community representation, and unconventional modes of writing and publishing. She has been published in a/b: Auto/Biography Studies, Zines Journal, M/C Journal, and Writing from Below. She is the creator of the long-running perzine Rut Zine.
Haunted and Haunting: Chaosmos, the Gothic, and Disintegrating Binaries in Reece Carter’s Tales from Elston-Fright Series
Jessica Cook (she/her) has a doctorate in literature and an insatiable love for stories, especially children’s fantasy fiction. She lives in joyful chaos in a fairy tale gum forest in Queensland where she reads, writes, wanders, drinks coffee, and cares for a menagerie of animals and children. She teaches literature at the University Southern Queensland, and has had creative works published in WQ, SWAMP, and soon in ‘The Orange & Bee’.
Magical Navigation: Writing Magic into the Australian Landscape
Tara East (she/her) is writer and researcher at University of Southern Queensland where she teaches creative writing. Her research has appeared in The Journal of Writing in Creative Practice, TEXT: Journal of Writing and Writing Courses, and Writing from Below. Her fiction has been published in Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, SWAMP magazine, October Hill Magazine, and TEXT Journal. She is also the author of the mystery novel, Every Time He Dies.
The Author is Dead. Long Live the Witness: Why Climate Fiction Is an Ethical Act, Not Just a Story
Ash McIntyre (she/her) is an academic and artist with a PhD in Literature from the University of Newcastle, where she currently lectures. Her research explores the intersections of literary ecocriticism, Anthropocene fictions, and literary activism, with a keen interest in interdisciplinary approaches that extend into soundscape ecology and gender studies. Ash is fuelled by a three-coffee-per-day limit, the endless promise of her towering ‘to read’ pile, pasta, and a resting attitude of over-enthusiasm for her work.
ChatGPT in Deep Time: Technology and Temporality in Kate Mildenhall’s The Hummingbird Effect
Tenille McDermott (she/her) is a writer and PhD candidate exploring the intersection between time, narrative, and machine-generated text. She is the co-editor of Sūdō Journal, and the co-host and co-producer of the podcast Edits & Annotations, a project of the Roderick Centre for Australian Literature and Creative Writing. She was the recipient of a 2025 Katharine Susannah Prichard Writers Centre Fellowship and longlisted for the 2025 AAWP/Westerly Life Writing Award.
