Abstracts & Bios

“Other to Ourselves”: Imagining Dementia and Decline in Contemporary Poetry"

Prof Sarah Holland-Batt, FAHA FQA

Dementia and other forms of cognitive illness are commonly figured as a loss of memory, selfhood, language, mind, and even of life itself. In contemporary media and public discourse, such experiences are routinely framed through metaphors of erosion, invasion, violence, contagion and social death; these figurations shape cultural attitudes to cognitive ageing and contribute to the significant stigma, marginalisation and social isolation experienced by individuals living with these conditions. Drawing on philosopher Catherine Malabou’s concept of “destructive brain plasticity,” in which subjects become “other to themselves,” this keynote explores dementia and cognitive illness as conditions marked by opacity and unknowability, and the ethical pressures this unknowability places on representation both in public discourse and in the literary domain. Through readings of work by contemporary poets including Anne Carson, Frank Ormsby and others, I examine how poetic metaphors of dementia complicate familiar oppositions between inside and outside, presence and absence, adulthood and childhood. The keynote also situates poetic representations of dementia against the broader cultural landscape of ageing, ageism, and necropolitical discourse, asking how metaphor operates not only as a literary device but as a force that acts on bodies, emotions, and social imaginaries. I argue that poetry, with its heightened attention to the implications of figurative language and the affordances of metaphor, offers alternative ways of thinking about cognitive decline that do not rely on narratives of disappearance or dehumanisation. I conclude by reflecting on my own poetic practice in writing poems about dementia and cognitive illness in the volume The Jaguar (UQP, 2022) and the possibilities and limits of writing into states that remain unknown.

Bio: Sarah Holland-Batt is an award-winning poet, editor and critic, and Head of the Creative Writing discipline at UTS.  She is the author of Aria (2008), The Hazards (2015), and The Jaguar (2022), with Selected Poems (2024) being published in the UK. The Jaguar won the Stella Prize and was named The Australian's Book of the Year. Sarah researches in the area of contemporary Australian and American poetics, with particular interests in the lyric poem, ekphrasis, violence and the abject, and literary representations of ageing, death and aged care.

‘On my grandfather’s tongue the word “worlds” had many meanings’: Imagining Indigenous Ageing in Aotearoa New Zealand Fiction and Film

Dr Emily Kate Timms, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary Global Literatures, University of Lincoln, UK

Writing in 2018, Sandy Grande (Quechua) observed a ‘conspicuous absence of a counter discourse and politics of aging within Native American and Indigenous studies’ in the face of norms surrounding ageing set by the Global North. Such an assessment seems surprising given Aotearoa New Zealand’s colonial and bicultural history, as kaumātuatanga (elderhood) and intergenerational relationships became inextricable from the politics and praxis of Indigenous decolonial activism. Similarly, Māori authors and directors have long been at the forefront of imagining Indigenous ageing beyond colonialism’s extractive and exclusionary logics and legalities.

As literary age studies and critical gerontology scholarship begins to challenge its disciplinary Eurocentrism by turning to Indigenous and postcolonial perspectives on later life, I propose that as much as such scholarship needs to change which texts are consulted, it is equally imperative to reconsider how Indigenous works are read and watched. Centring Māori and Pasifika ontologies and cultural theories such as kaumātuatanga, mate wareware (dementia), spiral time, and the transoceanic, I read a range of canonical Māori authors’ and directors’ texts as imaginaries of kaumātuatanga and ageing. Such texts offer subtle, but radical, decolonial visions for Indigenous intergenerational health, activism, and life with dementia in the 21st century. These powerful imaginaries of Māori ageing bring into relief how ageing studies and postcolonial scholarship must reframe each other’s ethical and activist priorities to better account for Indigenous ageing as decolonial resistance. Ultimately, this talk proposes that there needs to be a ‘worlding’ of the words, the methodologies, and the metaphors underscoring the cultural construction and materiality of ageing and intergenerational relations so that it becomes possible to imagine – and question – a plurality of Indigenous intergenerational futures in an ageing world.

Poetic Portraits of Older Australians 

Cassandra Atherton and Jessica L. Wilkinson)

Poetic Portraits is an innovative project aimed at celebrating the diverse lives of older Australians through poetry. Collaborating with thirteen talented poets from various backgrounds, we engaged with participants, where possible, aged 75 and older. This initiative provided a platform for those often unheard, allowing them to share their life stories and experiences in an intimate two-hour interview format. From these interviews, each poet crafted poems that reflected the unique voices of their subjects, capturing significant moments, challenges, and wisdom. The collaborative process ensured that participants remained at the forefront, with their narratives preserved through a poetic lens. The resulting collection of poetry, called Memory Book, not only honours older Australians' experiences but also fosters intergenerational dialogue, offering insights and advice for future generations. By foregrounding the participants in this anthology, we emphasize the co-creation of narratives that listen, allowing the voices of older Australians to resonate authentically in the literary landscape.

Robyn Rowland AO is an Irish-Australian citizen. Living between Ireland and Victoria for over 40 years, and working in Turkey since 2009, Robyn now lives in regional Victoria. In December 2019 she moved back to Australia, as companion then carer for her father, who died at 102 in 2022. Her most recent book, Steep Curve (Five Islands Press, 2024), emerged from those years. She has 12 books of poetry, including 2 bilingual Turkish/English: Under This Saffron Sun – Safran Güneşin Altında and This Intimate War Gallipoli/Çanakkale 1915 – İçli Dışlı Bir Savaş: Gelibolu/Çanakkale 1915. She has won or been listed for various prizes e.g.  Myslexia, ACU Poetry Prize, the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, Antipodes: Journal of Australian and New Zealand Literature International Poetry prize. Her poetry appears in national/international journals in 9 countries, fifty anthologies, eight editions of Best Australian Poems (Black Inc). She has read in India, Portugal, Ireland, UK, USA, Greece, Austria, Bosnia, Serbia, Turkey and Italy, and is published in translation. She is filmed reading in National Irish Poetry Reading Archive, Special Collections, James Joyce Library, UCD, e.g . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7KfJL_otFc

Before 1996, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer and left academic life, Professor Rowland was Inaugural Head of the School of Social Inquiry and Director of the Australian Women’s Research Centre at Deakin University. Robyn edited and refereed for a multitude of international journals. She had published 100 journal articles and chapters and delivered over 100 public addresses or conference papers. In the 1996 Australian Government Honours List she was made an Officer in the Order of Australia by the Governor General, for her national and international contributions to women’s health and higher education.

"Unearthing vulnerability in our connections and care with elderly people and other-than-human beings- what is the relationship?"

Lucy Egan, University of Newcastle

Using storying as a methodology, my creative writing PhD uses my relationship with my maternal grandmother to explore our relationships with our elderly people and other-than-human beings like animals, plants and Country. I am interested in reconsidering the meaning and possibilities of vulnerability, beyond a standard Western binary of good and bad. I am interested in the emotions, ethics and actions entangled in our mutual vulnerability such as care, dignity, sovereignty, love, grief, intimacy, fear, trust, response-ability and respect, both for our Elders and other-than-human beings. We all have bodies that allow us to experience ageing, illness, death and life, as well as these emotions, and this is something that I am interested in expressing. What could it mean to inspect, reimagine and embody these feelings and intra-actions between our worlds?

I will read from my creative thesis some of the moments where there is entanglement or collisions or relationality between these bodies; mine, my grandma, the animals, plants and Country that surround us and discuss how paying attention through writing and storytelling; allows us to consider who and what we call family.

“Embracing positive aging in a small poetry-writing community: Writing and Sense of Belonging”

Ed Creely, Monash University

Edwin (Ed) Creely is a senior lecturer in the Faculty of Education at Monash University. His current projects include academic wellbeing, digital literacies for adults from migrant and refugee backgrounds, literacy practices in the middle years, and an ethnographic investigation of an older adult poetry class. Core to Ed’s work is his interest in innovation, cross-disciplinary research, and creative practices. Ed is enthusiastic about exploring new models and perspectives to educational research and practice.