Hot Desk Extract: HAMS

As part of the Wheeler Centre’s Hot Desk Fellowship program, Elese Dowden worked on a verse novel entitled ‘HAMS’, and continued her research into the influence of George Grey (a prominent coloniser in Australia, Aotearoa and South Africa) and Australian avant-garde literary culture in the 1960s and 1970s. The story takes on a fantasical, concept-laden and sometimes farcical tone in following a set of shifting protagonists to investigate the structure of the settler ego, gender and romance in the present day.