Running hot on the national Austlit Discussion Group email waves recently was the question of speaking position and voice for men in contemporary critical discourse. What had occasioned the discussion was ASAL’s annual conference in Canberra, part of which had been a very successful morning at the Australian War Memorial focussing on writing and war (e.g. Alan Gould and Don Charlwood).

On the computer airwaves, women (e.g. Kerryn Goldsworthy and Cath Ellis) voiced their sense of repugnance for and distance from the ways Australian identity is often construed in terms of male heroics (e.g. the bushman/ANZAC). What was especially interesting and timely for me was that some of the men (e.g. Chris Lee and Dennis Haskell) also expressed their sense of being marginalised by the predominantly male nationalist discourses of, for example, the ANZAC ‘legend’.