Special Issue 45 is based on a selection of papers from the second Australasian Death Studies Network (ADSN) conference held in Noosa, Queensland in October 2016. These scholars and creative practitioners explored a wide range of topics including: representations of death and dying in literature, visual art and the media, music and various types of popular culture; Gothic representations of death, dying and the undead; and writing about death and dying across cultures and historical periods. Writing about gender, aging and trauma in relation to death and dying were also discussed, as were transgression, murder and crime fiction. The keynote address, ‘A day in the life of a funeral director’, was not only a highlight of the conference, but provided a heady measure of realism to the deliberations.
- Special Issues: scholarly articleIn the process of writing my memoir about living with my adoptive parents, I have had to reconstruct their lives through the objects and things that they left behind...
- Special Issues: scholarly articleCapital punishment was common practice in the early decades of colonial Australia: the malefactor swinging from the end of a hangman’s noose a well-known sight...
- Special Issues: scholarly articleThe Australian beach is a place of significant beauty, while simultaneously a place of risk and danger...
- Special Issues: scholarly articleThis article examines Michel Franco’s film, Chronic (2015), which features a nurse who works in home-based palliative care, and whose character defies stereotypes.
- Special Issues: scholarly articleUsing the tools of visual rhetoric, this article explores one Australian funeral company’s use of marketing images that consciously subvert the traditionally gendered depiction of funerals and mourning.
- Special Issues: scholarly articleInformed by surveying a number of composers’ diverse responses, this article outlines differences found in order to propose a taxonomy of varying creative musical approaches to death.
- Special issues: creative worksThe whole experience of Dad’s death was shattering, but from the despair there emerged a greater degree of courage, strength and personal growth...
- Special issues: creative worksMy question has been the same since the beginning. I ask it, loud and clear: I want to know where Teddy is buried...
- Special issues: creative worksPearl sized, compact. Faded at the base. / On a stalk so tender it hurts...
- Special issues: creative worksThere is a foul stench on this stretch of road as if something has been rotting in the culvert below...