Credo: Selected Essays

Credo brings together essays from different stages in Imants Tillers’ career, from ‘Locality Fails’ to ‘Metafisica Australe’ and ‘Journey to Nowhere’, and closes with an essay written especially for the collection, ‘The Sources’, on the artists and writers he has drawn on in his art. These essays express an aesthetic credo which has larger implications for both literature and art created out of the experience of migration. His self-coined concepts like ‘the idea of incommensurability’ and ‘reversible destiny’, his ideas about appropriation and the importance of reproduction in Australian culture, the encyclopaedic range of his work, and his orientation and re-orientation towards Aboriginal art, articulate an Australian aesthetic which constantly seeks connectedness between the local and the international, and a broader understanding of the complexities of provincialism. What he calls ‘the revolt of the margins’ is evident in the provocative nature of his writing too, in its wit and irony and intelligence.