Sparks and Seams: An Interview with Morag Fraser

Abstract

Morag Fraser visited James Cook University in August 1998 at the invitation of The Foundation for Australian Literary Studies and the School of Humanities. She delivered the Colin Roderick Lecture on her chosen topic: "Substance and Illusion: Crosscurrents in Australian Landscape Painting and Australian Literature."

For the last seven years Morag Fraser has edited Eureka Street, a magazine of public affairs, the arts and theology published by the Australian Jesuits. In that time she has also co-edited Save Our ABC: The Case for Maintaining Australia's National Broadcaster (with Joseph O'Reilly, Hyland House, 1996) and collected Seams of Light: Best Antipodean Essays (Allen & Unwin, 1998). Much in demand as a commentator on cultural and political affairs, she is deeply committed to informed public debate and to the institutions which make such things possible—the journals, the Universities and the ABC. But her work as an editor is impelled also by pleasure in bringing ideas, arguments and insights together, to produce what she calls "abrasion," "sparks," the creative energy of dynamic juxtaposition. "Substance and Illusion," the lecture to the Foundation for Australian Literary Studies printed also in this volume, reflects these preoccupations. She explored them further the morning after the lecture, in conversation with Greg Manning.