Abstracts et Bios | European Association for Studies of Australia

Albisson Grégory

Managing Natural Resources in New Zealand: Towards a Bicultural Perspective?

Since the 1980s, the Aoteraroa New Zealand Crown has been committed to reconciliation with the archipelago’s first inhabitants. Every now and then new laws are voted to recognise tikanga, or customary laws / correct way of doing things. Among them, the Resource Management Act 1991 states that the “relationship of Māori and their culture and traditions with their ancestral lands, water, sites, wahi tapu [sacred places], and other taonga [treasures]” is a matter of national importance. Two decades later, a river and a national park have become legal entities out of respect for Māori tikanga and the Crown’s Treaty obligations (and also for environmental reasons). That being said, have the successive governments been able to meet the same expectations in terms of resource management? Can the full recognition of Māori conception of natural resources achieve greater national unity? Or is it fundamentally incompatible with the nation’s current economic model and mainstream Pākehā [New Zealanders of European descent] views?

Gregory Albisson is a lecturer in British and Commonwealth Studies at Grenoble Alpes University. His thesis topic under the supervision of Professor Francine Tolron looked into the question of Māori street gangs and so-called neotribal theories. His current research is on bicultural policies and natural resources in New Zealand as well as climate migrants, refugees and asylum seekers in Australia and New Zealand.

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Auguste Isabelle

Alter/native : Implementing the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples in Australia

« The 13th of September 2007 will be remembered as a day when the United Nations and its Member States, together with Indigenous Peoples reconciled with past painful histories and decided to march into the future path of human rights… » (Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, Former Chairperson of the UN Permanent Forum, 13 September 2007). On the 13th of September 2007, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP), one of the most comprehensive instrument setting standards and foundations for the protection of 370 million Indigenous peoples worldwide, the result of more than twenty years of work. Australia was among the four countries which first voted against the Declaration in 2007 before backing it two years after. In this presentation, we will look closely at UNDRIP and its 46 articles and show that implementing the Declaration could be an alternative to the status quo in Australia. We will argue, in particular, that the first measure to be taken for its implementation to be effective should be a negotiated framework which would address the unfinished business of reconciliation in the country and mark the beginning of a new relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

Isabelle Auguste is from Reunion Island and has been working in the field of Australian Studies since 1999. She has had the opportunity to prepare her PhD under the supervision of historian Peter Read (2005) and to be a visiting fellow at Australian Centre for Indigenous Histories (Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University) in 2007-2008. Her main areas of interest are : Indigenous Peoples’ rights and Reconciliation in Australia. She is currently a teacher at the Université de la Réunion.

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Belleflamme Valérie-Anne

“Peering into the Darkness”: The Leper Colony in The Death of Noah Glass by Gail Jones

In her essay “Dark Places: The Movement of the Image”, Gail Jones takes Fra Angelico’s painting Pious Women at the Tomb (1440) as a starting point for her tribute to the work of her late friend and mentor Veronica Brady. The intriguing painting depicts four women peering down into Christ’s marble casket, looking for his absent body. However, they are all looking the wrong way, their gaze misdirected, and hence not seeing the apparition of the resurrected Christ floating above their heads. The painting, Jones concludes, “is essentially of mistake,” it is “of assuming emptiness and absence, and of missing meaning” (10, original emphasis).

Taking her cue from Bruno Latour’s recommendation that we should multiply mediators not only in our reading of paintings but also in our understandings, Jones then argues that we should consider the inclusion of “an ‘inferred’ dimension, generously and openly, in all forms of knowledge – in science, philosophy, art and social theory” (11). We should, she specifies, “consider movements of disembodiment and reembodiment,” “imagine competing vectors in the construction of meaning” and “admit the non-realist and inexact qualities in all things” (11).

This, I believe, is precisely what she aestheticises in her latest novel, The Death of Noah Glass (2018), namely through the spatial image of the leprosarium in the north of Western Australia and the bodily image of its Indigenous patients, with their “eroded faces and missing ears”, “sitting in the shadows” (41). Consequently, my paper will investigate how the leper colony and the leprous body trigger the “undoing of certainty, kenosis as a mode of knowing” and, as such, act as alter/native spaces in which “art speaks in oblique and multiple registers,” “peering into the darkness,” “intuiting, not seeing directly,” and therefore allowing the emergence of alter/native meanings and discourses (Jones, “Dark Places” 11).

Besides her work as a graduate assistant, Valérie-Anne Belleflamme is currently working on a doctoral dissertation on temporality and the craft of fiction in Gail Jones’s literary oeuvre at the University of Liège, Belgium. Her research interests are in postcolonial studies and Australian literature, as well as in narratology and phenomenology. She is also a member of CEREP, the English Department’s postcolonial research unit at the University of Liège, and together with Marie Herbillon and Maryam Mirza, she has guest-edited the JEASA issue entitled “Australia-South Asia: Contestations and Remonstrances,” which was published in 2017.

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Bernard Virginie

A treaty that dares not speak its name : The Noongar Agreement in the Australian South West

In Australia, there is a gap between, on the one hand, the apparent willingness of the state to recognize the Indigenous Australians and the legal and institutional measures that seem to abound in this sense and, on the other hand, the mechanisms of control that it puts in place to refuse claims for recognition.

As a liberal state, it privileges the rights of individuals and is wary of the international legal category of “Indigenous peoples” and its possible repercussions at the national level. Indeed, this category confers on the peoples claiming it the status of legal personalities and grants them collective rights which are the responsibility of states. The Australian state notably perceives the right to self-determination as likely to open the way to independence movements and refuses any idea of a treaty.

In this context, to settle their native title claims and assert their place in the mainstream Australian society, the Aborigines Noongars of the South West of Western Australia stand aside, in their majority, from the international discourses on indigeneity and claims to a treaty. Instead, they have negotiated a comprehensive agreement with the State of Western Australia.

This presentation aims to demonstrate that this agreement is a treaty that dares not say its name. It will show that the Noongars have defended the idea of a Noongar Nation, an Alter/Native space within the Australian nation, articulating the principle of “internal” sovereignty to reframe their relationship with the Australian state. They have fashioned a noongar identity according to the general criteria that characterize the category of “Indigenous peoples” and claim the same rights it accords.

Virginie Bernard, in June 2018, defended her doctoral thesis in social and historical anthropology, prepared at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, entitled: “When the State interferes with ‘tradition’: the struggle of the Noongars of the Australian South West for their recognition”. Her research interests include Australia (Western Australia, South Western Australia), colonisation, Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal relations, Indigenous land claims, state relations and Indigeneity. She has conducted a total of 16 months of ethnographic surveys in the South West of Western Australia, combining participant observation, conversations and interviews, data collection and archival research. She is currently associated with the Centre de Recherche et de Documentation sur l’Océanie, CREDO (Aix-Marseille Université, CNRS, EHESS, CREDO UMR 7308).

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Birchall Matthew

British Company Colonisation and Indigenous Space, 1815–1840

This talk analyses how chartered colonial enterprise propelled the settler revolution. Characterised by mass emigration to Britain’s settler colonies during the long nineteenth century, the settler revolution transformed Chicago and Melbourne, London and New York, drawing all into a vast cultural network that straddled the globe. But while the settler revolution is now well integrated into British imperial history, it remains curiously disconnected from the global history of capitalism. In the wake of the Napoleonic Wars, however, a suite of antipodean colonisation and agricultural trading companies were established in London, all of which had a profound impact on British imperial policy in the South Pacific, an oceanic world disrupted by European landfall.

Challenging the presumption that a “settler boom mentality” explains the surge in emigration to Britain’s settler colonies in the nineteenth century and calling into question Vincent Harlow’s classic distinction between the First and Second British Empires, this talk aims to show how and why companies remade indigenous space in the 1830s, focusing in particular on South Australia and New Zealand. Chartered colonial enterprise, I show, decisively shaped antipodean land settlement, linking the Pacific new world to metropolitan capital and a social network of “gentlemanly capitalists,” a cluster of London-based merchants and land speculators who employed a carefully constructed interpretation of British imperial history and deep pools of capital, narrative power and the coercive force of money, to underwrite sovereign claims to Aboriginal Australian and Māori tribal land.

Matthew Birchall is a Smuts Scholar at Jesus College, Cambridge, where he is working towards a PhD in History under the supervision of Duncan Bell. His dissertation examines British colonisation and agricultural trading companies in the early nineteenth century, among them the Australian Agricultural Company, the Canada Company and the New Zealand Company. He has previously worked as the Editor for Learnerbly, an education

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Black Prudence

Clearing Country and Opening the Skies: Indigenous Workers and the Aviation Industry

Much has been written about the ‘pioneering’ movement of white Australians and the aviation industry, but this paper aims to get to an aspect of the essential infrastructure making it possible, in this case how Indigenous Australians were used not only as available labour, but also for their specific expertise about the terrain, the supply and movement of water and specific knowledge of weather patterns. The paper will focus on the period from the 1930s to the 1950s when civil and military aviation was expanding across the northern part of Australia, and outline how Indigenous labour was used to prepare airstrips and provide crucial support for the aviation industry. It was through local knowledge and the labour of the Indigenous people that the industry could operate and expand, and in many instances ensure the safety of those flying.

Prudence Black is a lecturer in the Faculty of Humanities, Adelaide University. Her research interests include interview-based projects about the aviation industry, the textile industry and female offenders in the New South Wales prison system. Current research relates to ‘Heritage of the Air’ an Australian Research Council project that will shape material for the Centenary of Civil Aviation in Australia in 2020. Her latest book is Smile, Particularly in Bad Weather: The Era of the Australian Airline Hostess, UWA Publications, 2017.

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Brewster Ann

Humour in Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip

As a young girl, Kerry Salter, the protagonist of Melissa Lucashenko’s recent novel is described as having ‘too much lip’. This cheeky narrative deploys a deft and mobile humour across a range of styles and race, gender and class contexts. Whether it is the humour used to ‘jar up’ whitefellas’ discomforts, complacency and ignorance; the humour used to counter the gendered violence of Ken, the Salter family’s ‘alpha male’; or the humour that emerges in response to the death and disappearance of family members which are situated within a long history of transgenerational racialised violence, humour is a powerful resource in the novel in negotiating Indigenous anger, rage, fear, shame and grief, affects which arise from poverty, criminalisation, dispossession and the oppression of women. Terse irony, exuberant farce, cutting satire and redolent gallows humour remind us of the dynamic and transformative nature of the comic mode and of the complex aesthetic and cultural work it undertakes.

In his study of Harlem Renaissance literature, Mike Chasar suggests that the ‘black laugh could go where the physical black body in many cases could not and thus could uniquely challenge white control of public space’. The worlding of novel is a rich medium for demonstrating the ways in which Aboriginal bodies are constantly put on the line. Yet the comedy of Too Much Lip also reminds us how these bodies constantly cross the line, ‘giving cheek’ to the scripts and discursive imperatives of the white nation, reclaiming an alter/native historicity and futurity.

Anne Brewster is an Associate Professor at the University of New South Wales. Her research interests include Australian Indigenous literatures, minoritised women’s literatures, and critical race and whiteness studies. Her books include Literary Formations: Postcoloniality, Nationalism, Globalism (1996), Reading Aboriginal Women’s Autobiography (1995, 2015), Giving This Country a Memory: Contemporary Aboriginal Voices of Australia, (2015), and (with Sue Kossew) Rethinking the Victim. Gender, Violence and Contemporary Australian Women’s Writing (2019). She is the series editor for Australian Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives Peter Lang Ltd.

Humour in Melissa Lucashenko’s Too Much Lip

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Callahan David

Configuring Australia Globally: Adding Australia to India in The Lost Legacy

In the internationally successful American video game The Lost Legacy, a spin-off of the massively popular Uncharted series, the central character, and the one we play as, is the daughter of an Indian father and an Australian mother. After having been a secondary character in Uncharted 2 and Uncharted 3, it is easy to see that Chloe Frazer’s elevation to protagonist may be responding to pressure on video game companies to be more attentive to representing women in roles which index competence in general, and competence in areas generally reserved for male protagonists. What is not so easy to read is Chloe’s identitarian and ethnic mix of Indian and white Australian. Indeed, The Lost Legacy has two competent action figures as its central characters, and they are both mature women, with Chloe’s companion, Nadine Ross, being a South-African of unspecified, but also mixed, background. Although The Lost Legacy is not a text produced by Australians, it does participate in global discourses of “Australianness,” which makes the choice of a mixed-parented Australian particularly interesting, and this particular mixture even more so. This paper would accordingly attempt to read the game’s ethnic politics as intersected by its gender politics, with the high profile of this game warranting investigation into the intelligibility or otherwise of the subject formation represented by its protagonist.

David Callahan is Associate Professor of English at the University of Aveiro, Portugal. His work has mostly concentrated on postcolonial topics, and appeared in journals such as Interventions, Postcolonial Studies, Critique, English Studies in Africa and … Clinical Anatomy, along with book chapters on varied subjects such as DNA and Surveillance in CSI, James Fenimore Cooper’s Androgynous Heroes, and The Last of the US: The Game as Cultural Geography. He is also the author of Rainforest Narratives: The Work of Janette Turner Hospital, and editor of other books on Australian and contemporary literature.

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David Carter

Before otherness: Australian Indigenous Authors in the US Marketplace

Since the 1980s, Indigenous authors have had a major impact in the Australian literary marketplace, producing some of the most significant works over this period, winning major literary prizes, and being published internationally. In many instances, however, achieving US publication has been a more difficult proposition than translation into European or other languages. Building on the research for my recently published co-authored study, Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace, 1840s-1940s (with Roger Osborne, 2018), this paper will explore the history of American editions of works by Indigenous Australian authors and their reception in the USA. Outside certain academic circles, Australian Indigenous works have had limited impact in the US in the absence of adequate reception frameworks or reading formations. The uneven course of “material transnationalism” tells a different story from the “textual transnationalism” so powerfully invoked in the works themselves and in critical discourses around “indigenous transnationalism”.

David Carter is Emeritus Professor (Australian Literature and Cultural History) in the School of Communication and Arts at the University of Queensland and formerly Director of the University’s Australian Studies Centre. Recent publications include Australian Books and Authors in the American Marketplace, 1840-1940s (2018), with Roger Osborne, and Always Almost Modern: Australian Print Cultures and Modernity (2013). He is currently Senior Editor (Australian Literature) for the online Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature and a researcher on the projects Australian Cultural Fields: National and Transnational Dynamics and Genre Worlds: Australian Popular Fiction in the 21^st Century. He has been involved in Australian Studies in China for more than twenty years and has twice held the Chair in Australian Studies at Tokyo University (2007-08; 2016-17).

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Danica Čerče

Redefining Indigenous Identity in the Poetry of Jeanine Leane

Based on the premise that literature can play an important role both in maintaining and disrupting the exercise of power, and written against the background of critical whiteness studies, the article deals with the collection of poems Dark Secrets (2010) by the Australian Indigenous author Jeanine Leane. It shows how the poet intervenes in what Sara Suleri (2003) calls “the static lines of demarcation” between subjugating and subjugated cultures, that is, the assumptions about whiteness as a static privilege-granting category and system of dominance upon which the logic of coloniality often stands. I argue that, by mobilising various techniques and strategies to challenge the reproduction of whiteness and affirm Indigenous Australians’ authentic rather than an imposed cultural personality, Leane performs both personal and collective empowerment of Indigenous peoples. In this way, her poetry is preparing the grounds for the society that, in Homi Bhabha’s words, “entertains differences without an assumed or imposed hierarchy.”

Danica Čerče is a Full Professor of Literatures in English teaching at the Faculty of Arts, University of Ljubljana. Her field of research includes contemporary American and Australian literature, with the focus on Indigenous writing, and Translation and Cultural Studies. She is the author of three monograph publications on John Steinbeck’s fiction, several book chapters in edited collections and conference proceedings, and has published several articles in various academic journals in Slovenia and abroad. Čerče is on the editorial board of Coolabah and Steinbeck Review, and the current President of the International Society of Steinbeck Scholars.

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Chen Hong

The shaping and reshaping impact of the Chinese language media on the Australia cultural landscape

The Chinese language media has steadily developed in Australia alongside with the rapid and substantial growth of the Chinese immigrant community in the country. It has played an important role in the retention and development of the ethnic Chinese Australians’ cultural identity and their integration into the broader Australian community. It is intrinsic to the promotion of the heterogeneous and multicultural nature of the Australian society, and helps diversify the cultural scenarios of the country. The Chinese language media outlets have served to preserve and promote the Chinese culture and to organically conjoin the cultural and social relations between the old and new generations of the Chinese immigrants. However, in the recent several years there has been some increasingly illogical, irrational and baseless controversy centring on the Chinese language media outlets, in particular with the scepticism of their political affiliations and motives. This paper is an analysis of the Chinese language media outlets’ historical development, the status quo, the debate and challenges targeting at them, and the relevant impact they have been exerting on the cultural, social and political landscape of Australia.

Professor Chen Hong is Director of Australian Studies Centre, Executive Director of Asia Pacific Studies Centre, and Head of Department of English at East China Normal University in Shanghai. He is also Executive Vice President of the Chinese Association of Australian Studies, and Deputy Editor-in-Chief of The Chinese Journal of Australian Studies, and The Journal of Studies of Australian Culture. Chen Hong’s research interests include China Australia relations, Australian foreign policies, Australian politics, Australian culture and Australian literature. He is author and co-author of several books and more than 30 academic papers in Australian Studies. Professor Chen teaches and researches in Australian Studies at East China Normal University. He also publishes and commentates frequently on China Australia relations and other international issues in major Chinese and international media outlets including Phoenix Television, Xinhua News Agency, China Radio International, China News Service, China Daily, Global Times, Liberation Daily, Shanghai Morning Post, Xinmin Evening News, The ABC (Australia), The Australian, The Australian Financial Review, The Sydney Morning Herald/The Age, WION Television (India), etc.

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Daozhi Xu

A Pluralism of Belonging in a Multicultural Australia

A sense of belonging has always been a matter of contestation and discord in Australia. Questions remain: what does “belonging” actually mean for different groups of people who have been dislocated either by force or by choice? How could one insist the right to belong? To what extent is one’s belonging to a place not exclusive of others’ claims of home? The complex issues of belonging underline enduring debates on national identities, histories, borders and territories in Australian settler society. It is associated with pressing concerns of Indigenous groups regarding their racialised identity and legitimate positioning in territorial entitlement. It also deals with the rising concerns of Asian immigrants who report being excluded from national debates regarding Indigenous–settler relations, and who are desirous of participating (Rolls, 2014). While the year 2018 marked the 200th anniversary of Chinese migration to Australia, commemorating the first recorded Chinese settler, Mak Sai Ying, who came to Australia from the Chinese city of Canton in 1818, little is known about different understandings of the ubiquitous term “settler” and its implications among Chinese and other Asian immigrants in Australia. This paper seeks to address different and contested forms of belonging vis-à-vis Indigenous and Asian Australians in literary and cultural expressions, explore the power relations underpinning these matters of disputes, and consider the possible ways that open up a space for a pluralism of belonging in the multicultural Australia.

Xu Daozhi is currently a research fellow at School of International Studies, Sun Yat-sen University, a part-time lecturer at School of English, the University of Hong Kong, and a university associate with the School of Humanities, the University of Tasmania. She holds a PhD in English literary studies from HKU. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, cultural theory, children’s literature, studies of race and ethnicity, settler colonialism. Her monograph Indigenous Cultural Capital: Postcolonial Narratives in Australian Children’s Literature (2018) won the Biennial Australian Studies in China Book Prize, awarded by Australia–China Council. It has also been shortlisted for the Association for the Study of Australian Literature (ASAL) “Alvie Egan Award” in 2019. Her scholarly articles have appeared in Journal of Australian Studies, Australian Aboriginal Studies, Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature, and Antipodes, etc. She is interested in translation and has translated or co-translated several books. She is on the Executive of the International Australian Studies Association.

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David Delphine

“Either You’re Black, or You’re Not”: Are In-between Identity Alternatives Possible in Today’s Australia?

Today, an increasing number of Australians chooses to identify as Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. Far from stereotypes limiting the definition of Indigenous people, this growing minority is more diverse than ever and, as T. Moore writes, “[is] living increasingly intercultural lives and identif[ies] in postethnic ways.”1 Such an evolution of Indigeneity follows from what M. Langton wrote: “The creation of ‘Aboriginality’ is not a fixed thing. (…) It arises from the intersubjectivity of black and white in a dialogue.”2 Moreover, it arises from individuals building their own identity journeys, and deciding how to integrate Indigeneity in their lives in multicultural Australia. Despite this, Indigeneity continues to be described in essential terms. This static perception linked to demands for racial loyalty makes it difficult for people in-between to assert their places. In a divided post-colonial country where, as a strategy of re-empowerment, reclaiming the right to self-identification leads some Indigenous people to focus on incommensurable differences with non-Indigenous Australians, there often seems to be little room for more fragmented identities questioning dominant discourses about Indigeneity. Using interviews of young Australians raised in a white culture but desirous to explore and/or claim their Indigenous heritage, this presentation aims at analysing the discourse according to which “you either are or you’re not Indigenous”, as well its impacts on people wishing to claim alternative, more plural and fluid, identities which reflect their personal trajectories as well as the complex historical and present links between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians.

Delphine David is a former student of the ENS Cachan. She passed the Agregation exam in English and has a PhD in English studies. She is specialised in Australian studies. She currently teaches at the university Paris 1 Pantheon-Sorbonne. Her research focuses on postcolonial relationships in Australia where she worked on several occasions. She is especially interested in studying the relationship between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, and the places these groups take in representations of national identity.

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Davidson-Novosivschei Claudia

My Kind and the Alter Native – a Border Perspective on David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon

“Given all that is going on, can the Other still be considered my kind? (…) The burden of the Other has become so debilitating, would it not be better if my life was not linked to his presence anymore, and his to mine? Why towards and against all, do I still have to watch over the other, very close to his life if, in exchange, his aim is my defeat?”

A shrinking earth and a growing population are the background for a non-relationship with the other, for a continuous demarcation from her/him, as Achille Mbembe suggests in Politiques de l’inimitié (2016), from which I translated the lines above.

Western states and their citizens make it financially possible for the border to be pushed further and further way. The other is confined to an alternative (and alter-native) space, a mentally discardable one, where wars and famine are carried out and suffered by some whom we insist are not our kind. Although stripped of mobility, if they manage to cut a way through, and get in our proximity, the border mechanism is activated through the deprivation of rights, such as the right to work, to vote, etc. The alternative space is thus legally generated within our very space.

It is within the framework of the border, as theorized by scholars such as Gloria Anzaldua and Achille Mbembe, that I shall look at David Malouf’s Remembering Babylon (1993) novel. In this world of ours that seems to have put up the sign “Do not enter, trespassers will be raped, maimed, strangled, gassed, shot” (Anzaldua), Malouf’s character, Gemmy – a ship’s boy taken in by Aborigines – comes from “a world over there, beyond the no-man’s-land of the swamp, that was the abode of everything savage and fearsome”, and crossing spaces, he also crosses (sub)human categories. Is Gemmy of our kind? Is he an alter native?

Claudia Novosivschei is a PhD student with the Faculty of Letters of Babes-Bolyai University Romania. Her PhD project focuses on Australian literature, more precisely the fiction of David Malouf and Peter Carey. Member of EACLALS and EASA since 2013, she participated in several international conferences: EACLALS (Innsbruck, 2014), Postcolonial Narrations (Frankfurt, 2014), EASA (Prato, 2014); British and American Studies Conference (Timisoara, 2015), EASA (Liege, 2017), EACLALS (Oviedo, 2017), Constructions of Identity 9 (Cluj-Napoca 2017), EASA (Barcelona, 2018). In 2015 she benefited from a research mobility at the University of Kent, UK.

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Dutto Matteo

Reframing the Cinematic Space of Migration: On- and Off-Screen Encounters between Italian Migrants and Indigenous Australian

Italian and Australian films and documentaries on the lives of first-, second- and third-generation Italian migrants to Australia have very rarely addressed how stories of Italian migration to Australia intersect with those of Indigenous Australians, focusing instead on how Italian migrants’ sense of belonging and space is constructed and negotiated through their relationships with the settler colonial nation.

This paper explores the role that screen media productions by Italian and Italo-Australian filmmakers have played in reinforcing or, conversely, unsettling this absence. It examines the work of filmmakers such as Luigi Zampa, Alessandro and Fabio Cavadini and Vincent Lamberti that have either represented these encounters on-screen or enacted them off-screen through transcultural collaborations, and artistic and political solidarity.

Focusing on how these films, documentaries and stories of collaboration offer alternative cinematic representations of migrants’ sense of belonging within a settler colonial nation, I argue that these are all accounts that add complexity to our understanding of the position that migrants and Indigenous people occupy in contemporary Australia, shedding light on how encounters between Italian migrants and Indigenous Australians can work to reinforce settler colonial ideologies or, instead, towards decolonisation and the redefinition of new models of transcultural belonging that operate at the borders of different systems of knowledge and draw on embodied and localised senses of belonging and identity.

Matteo Dutto is ACIS Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Monash University in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics. His current research explores how cultural producers collaborate with Indigenous, migrant and multi-ethnic communities to produce transmedia and transcultural counter-narratives of belonging and identity. His work has been published in Studies in Documentary Film and Fulgor and he recently collaborated to the production of the Australian Indigenous Film and Television (AIFTV) online knowledge sharing platform. His first monograph Legacies of Indigenous Resistance will be published by Peter Lang Oxford in 2019 as part of the ‘Australian Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives’ series.

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Elder Catriona

Family, race, romance and anxiety: Reading some of FJ Thwaites’ fiction.

This article takes a group of popular fiction novels, written by FJ Thwaites in the 1930s and 1940s uses them to explore themes of family, nation, race, desire and anxiety. Thwaites was a prolific writer and a group of his novels have adventure-romance plots involving a sexual relationship between a white man and a non-white woman. These novels were often set in ‘exotic’ locations – from Nigerian jungles, to the Polynesian tropical islands. The analysis focus on the ways in which these texts’ descriptions of love and romance including how and when the taboo of inter-cultural desire were represented. Tropes explored include: the language characters use to express love across ‘colour lines’; the authorial descriptions of gendered beauty, especially in relation to skin colour; and concluding imaginings of the future – especially family and children – in relation to inter-cultural. Overall, the paper seeks to better understand the ways in which ideas of race, culture and skin colour were and still are used to demarcate the boundaries of a ‘white’ nation space. It also considers the ways in the very status of Thwaites’ novels as a type of ‘pulp’ adventure and romance fiction – shape what can be said in the texts and how issues are resolved.

Catriona Elder is located in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney. Across her academic career her teaching and research interests have centred on Australian race relations, often in a comparative context. Dr Elder’s publications have explored national identities and belonging in settler colonial spaces, especially in relation to the everyday and intimacy. Her research often analyses popular culture—novels, films, and images—as well as oral histories.

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Farrall-Anquet Reia

Ideas, Environmental Policy and Australian National Identity

Australian national identity owes much to the struggle between mostly European immigrant settlers – and the natural Australian environment. The settler Australians encounter with the natural elements, has produced such national icons as the “Aussie battler”, mateship, the legend of the farmer, and the “she’ll be right” attitude; stemming from the brutality of the Australian land and seascapes.

Settler Australians knew that they are here today, but due to drought, flood, bushfire or cyclone, might be gone tomorrow. How have these images of national identity affected the ways in which Australian governments have administered environment and resource use in Australia over the past 230 years? As Australia has always been a country of ecological extremes, is the rhetoric of Australian settler values keeping the nation from seeing the environmental truth of climate change? How can Australia overcome these entrenched ideas to seriously consider Alter/Native environmental and resource policies?

Using public policy theories, this paper will analyse which paradigms and ideas pervade present environmental policy and resource governance in Australia. Australia needs to recognise how its environmental policies have developed in order to find new ‘hybrid’ cultural solutions for the Anthropocene to deal with problems of sustainability, biodiversity loss and climate change.

Reia Farrall-Anquet is an English Lecturer (PRCE) at Sciences Po Grenoble, where she teaches English for special purposes on Bachelor’s and Master’s courses, as well as lecture content-based courses on Australian Identity, and Environment and Society. She is a PhD candidate, under the supervision of Professor Susanne Berthier-Foglar (Université Grenoble-Alpes), and Professors Benjamin Richardson and Marcus Haward (University of Tasmania, Australia). Her thesis topic investigates the interplays between common law, legislation, public policy; and the opportunities for participation of Indigenous Peoples’ in environmental governance in Australia.

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Foster Meg

Mary Ann Bugg: an intersectional life

In the mid-nineteenth century, colonial Australians were presented with a problem in the form of Mary Ann Bugg. The Aboriginal ‘wife’ of famous bushranger Captain Thunderbolt threatened white properties and lives when she helped her spouse in his daring escapades. She rode and dressed like a man, butchered cattle and undertook strenuous physical labour, but no one could deny that she was still very much a woman. Her feminine beauty did not escape the attention of contemporaries, her children accompanied her and Thunderbolt through the bush and colonial newspapers referred to Mary Ann the way that she described herself; as ‘the Captain’s Lady’. How then, did white Australians deal with such a troublesome woman? How did they approach a person who challenged, conformed and complicated their beliefs about race, womanhood and masculinity in almost equal measure? These are the questions that this paper will answer. In doing so, it will reveal the messy, complex, yet very real way that action and imagination worked together to shape Aboriginal women’s lives in the nineteenth century.

Meg Foster is a PhD candidate in History at the University of New South Wales, Australia and is currently a Visiting Student at the University of Cambridge. Under the supervision of Professor Grace Karskens and Professor Lisa Ford, Meg is investigating the ‘other’ bushrangers (Australian outlaws who were not white men) in history and memory. After completing her honours-thesis on Indigenous-bushrangers-in-2013, Meg worked-as a researcher with the Australian Centre of Public History at the University of Technology, Sydney. She is the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, such as the 2018 Aboriginal History Award from the History Council of NSW and a King’s College Bicentennial Scholarship in 2017. She was also the inaugural winner of the Deen De Bortoli Award in Applied History for her article, ‘Online and Plugged In?: Public history and historians in the digital age’ featured in the Public History Review (2014). As well as her PhD, Meg works as an historical consultant and has a particular interest in making connections between history and the contemporary world.

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Giffard-Foret Paul

Aboriginal-Asian Provinces in Simone Lazaroo’s Fiction

The emergence and affirmation in Australia of alternative voices under the aegis of multicultural discourse led to the burgeoning of new fields of inquiry and ways of revisiting the nation’s master-narrative. Two minority constituencies in particular — by their felt presence, the public debate and media attention they generated — have called for a reappraisal of Australia’s place in the world, so far as to become constitutive minorities in the eyes of scholars in Cultural Studies. Both “Asian” and “Aboriginal” Australian identity formations strategically amalgamate various languages, cultures and peoples together. These umbrella terms call to attention self-othering processes of (dis)identification resulting from the way Australia was historically constructed as a white settler-colony and British imperial outpost in the Far East. Both groups have separately challenged the pre-eminence of a White Australia and its lingering nostalgic elements beyond a Eurocentric worldview in the contemporary era, yet there persists a dearth of scholarship on joint scenes of cross-fertilisation. Mapping out the scope of this “contact zone” (Pratt), without conflating shared yet asymmetrical relations between the two sides of the hyphen will contribute to further “provincialising” (Chakrabarty) Australia. As I argue in the fiction of Singaporean-born Australian novelist Simone Lazaroo, specific points of contact between Aboriginal and Asian realities represent a “Third Space” (Bhabha) of enunciation whereby Australia may be rethought of as a transnational continuum with the neighbouring Southeast Asian region and islands of the Pacific.

Paul Giffard-Foret earned his PhD from Monash University’s Centre for Postcolonial and Australian Writing on the topic of Southeast Asian Australian women’s fiction. His research has been concerned with postcolonial critical theory, Asian Australian studies, diasporic and multicultural literatures. More recently, he has also developed an interest in Indian literatures and social movements, and indigenous Australian cultural politics. His work has appeared in the form of peer-reviewed articles and book chapters in various academic journals both internationally and in France, where he carries out his research and has taught at the University of Paris XIII. He is a copy editor for the refereed open access journal Postcolonial Text and a regular contributor to the Australian journal Mascara Literary Review.

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Giovanangeli Angela

Interactivity and Encounter in Contemporary Australian Art Practices: Engaging the Public with Invisible Histories and Cultural Ownership

Notions of alternative and multiplicity present an interface for reimagining historical encounters meshed with contemporary issues of entanglement. Such an interface coincides with opportunities offered by Australian contemporary art practices that speak to local experiences of place and how this might challenge understandings of national narratives as well as offer pedagogical tools to explore intersections of compounded entanglement across cultures. In this paper, I argue that contemporary art practices in Australia play a significant role in engaging viewers with complex historical, cultural and political issues centred around recalibrating historical perspectives. The paper takes a case study of some of the works of artists to examine how spaces of interactivity and encounter help to unleash dialogue and previously undisclosed knowledge by addressing issues such as invisible histories and cultural ownership.

Angela Giovanangeli is a senior lecturer in the School of International Studies at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Angela’s broad field of research is in cultural histories and intercultural engagement. In particular, she works on visual and cultural practices especially in relation to French and European cultural programs and Australian Indigenous perspectives in Tertiary Education.

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Gleeson Paige

Casting Shadow Networks onto the Photographic Archive: Hobart’s ‘blackbirding’ album

Conceptualisations of space, fluid and infused with political ideology and racial anxiety, have always been central to the Australian settler-colonial project. This paper seeks to reconceptualise the geographies of coastal and island Australia within a framework of oceanic connection with the Pacific, as opposed to understanding the colonial territorial divides constructed by the Australian nation state as reflective of a natural spatial logic. Frequently disregarded Pacific and Australian Indigenous conceptualisations of space challenge such assumptions and throw into sharp relief the politics of European geographical imagination. This paper seeks to address questions regarding the history of the nationalisation of space through a photographic album held by the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery (TMAG).

Tracing histories of maritime travel and connection in the colonial Pacific through the TMAG photographs reveals links between the seemingly disparate geographies of Hobart, Queensland and the Australian Territory of Papua. The images in this album picture ‘blackbird’ recruiting, the term used to describe the recruitment of indentured labourers from Melanesia for Queensland’s sugar plantations in the late nineteenth century. Viewed singularly, such photographs could be read as presenting a straight forward visual record of Australian exploitation of Pacific Islanders. It was a network of exploitation that linked South Sea Islanders to Australia, paralleled by maritime networks that facilitated science, missions, business and trade and which linked Hobart to Queensland and the Pacific, generating the material networks through which this album found its way back into the hands of the TMAG’s curator in 1906. This paper takes an alternate approach, applying historian Banivanua Mar’s concept of shadow networks, allowing the photographs to expand beyond their frames as material traces of a more complex narrative of Indigenous autonomy, movement and resistance.

Paige Gleeson is a PhD Candidate at the University of Tasmania within the Australian Research Council project ‘Reform in the Antipodes’. Paige has published on colonial and postcolonial photography and feminist history, was recipient of the 2019 National Library of Australia’s residential Summer Scholarship, and has given papers on colonial history and anthropology at a number of conferences in Australia. Paige’s research interests include Indigenous and transnational histories of Australia and the Pacific, colonial photography, ethnographic collection, humanitarianism, the history of anthropology, and museum studies.

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Grasso Arianna

Rewriting the Refugee Identity in Alter/Native Spaces: The Australian Case

Since the 2012 reimplementation of the Pacific Solution, refugees and asylum seekers, who have tried to reach the Australian shores in the hope of obtaining residency permits, have instead been arbitrarily confined on the offshore detention centres of Nauru and Manus Pacific Islands. The choices of the Australian government regarding this contentious issue have inevitably generated heated debates within the (virtual) political arena, which landed on social media platforms. The present research aims to investigate whether and how online interactional spaces, such as Twitter, are dominated by the so-called white anxiety and paranoid nationalism, and particularly how the identity of refugees and asylum seekers has been discursively reconceptualised, while being subjugated to new forms of neo-colonialist discourses. In this vein, recent investigations have demonstrated that other Alter/Native Spaces inhabited by subaltern subjects have been colonised and appropriated, not only physically but also politically and ideologically. The purpose of the study is therefore to analyse, from a linguistic and semantic perspective, how representations regarding the refugee identity are constructed online, both by nationalist leaders and social media users. The research relies on a mixed methodology that combines: Corpus Linguistics to elicit and analyse quantitative data from the research opportunistic Twitter corpus; Political Discourse Analysis and approaches of Content Analysis to single out thematic patterns and occurring metaphors that emerge within narratives and counter narratives produced on the refugee identity. The study has the ultimate scope of unveiling the ideological substratum underlying the political discussion and encourage social media users to become aware of the manipulative discriminatory practices circulating online.

Arianna Grasso is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Literary, Linguistics and Comparative Studies of the University of Naples “L’Orientale”. She has obtained an International Master Degree in Sociolinguistics and Multilingualism with a master’s thesis titled Body Perception in Sex Workers’ Speech and Identity Construction. Her research interests focus on Sociolinguistics, Gender Studies and Social Media Studies.

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Hage Ghassan

No Way: Australia from the Radical Point of Non-Belonging

‘No Way You Will Make Australia Home’ says the infamous immigration poster directed at asylum seekers, recently a source of inspiration for Donald Trump. While Asylum seekers experience this ‘No Way’ at sea on their way to Australia, many experience it even after having been in Australia for a long time. For me, for example, it comes when the question of Palestine comes to the fore: I am in a situation where I feel as I often do as fully belonging to Australia, as sharing with at least some Australians similar cultural tastes and political orientations and then Palestine comes to the fore and all of a sudden it is ‘No Way’. I call this the radical point of non-belonging as it involves a fundamentally different relation to what exists. For some like Indigenous people and Muslims it is a continuous dimension of life where various degrees of belonging and radical non-belonging are entangled. I am interested in some writing that reveals to us what Australia looks like from this point. I am also interested in the way radical non-belonging contains the seeds of a different belonging.

Ghassan Hage is professor of Anthropology and Social Theory at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He has held many visiting professorships in Europe and the United States, most recently the Chair of Euro-Philosophy at the Université de Toulouse. His research interests include: Critical Anthropological Theory; Comparative nationalism, colonialism and racism; The work of Pierre Bourdieu; The anthropology of the Palestinian question; and The anthropology of Lebanon and the Lebanese diaspora. His more recent works includes Alter-Politics: Critical Anthropological Thought and the Radical Imagination (2016), and Is Racism an Environmental Threat? (2017).

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Hauthal Janine

European Modernities in Contemporary Australian Novels

This paper investigates imaginings of Europe born in contemporary Australian fiction in order to explore whether (traveling to) Europe provides alternative points of reference to discourses on nation, belonging, and identity beyond the (settler) postcolonial. The paper sets out to compare recent works by Peter Carey, Christos Tsiolkas and Gail Jones who narrate Europeagainst a wide range of backgrounds, covering diverse diasporic, migratory and expatriate experiences, in order to explore the role of Europe as alternative space, and of European modernities in particular, in the Australian literary imagination. Concentrating on Jack Maggs (1997), Dead Europe (2005) and A Guide to Berlin (2015), the paper has a threefold focus: First of all, it will concentrate on the representation of European spaces and explore how the three novels relate urban and peripheral spaces in ways that draw attention to multiple modernities within Europe. Secondly, the representation of time will be scrutinized in order to show how the three novels imagine the past and the present as intertwined and how they, in their own way, reveal European modernities to be haunted by its other, i.e. death, superstition, ghosts, or the occult. Thirdly, these previous findings will be synthesized in order to determine how the three novels relate Europe to Australia. Do the novels challenge or perpetuate the protagonists’ desire for Europe as an ‘imaginary homeland’? How do they (re-)value Europe vis-à-vis the protagonists’ Australian homelands? Do references to Europe support the construction of national identity in the works under review, or do these references rather point to the emergence of transnational identities? In concluding, I will seek to connect my findings to the different acts of migration and tourism that the three novels depict.

Janine Hauthal is Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation – Flanders at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (2014-2021) where she is affiliated with the Centre for Literary and Intermedial Crossings. Her research interests include ‘fictions of Europe’, metareference across media and genres, contemporary (Black) British writing, postcolonial literature and theory, postdramatic theatre (texts) and transgeneric/transmedial narratology. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Modern Drama, Journal for Postcolonial Writing, Lili – Zeitschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Linguistik and English Text Construction as well as with Brill, De Gruyter and Routledge. She is currently completing a monograph on Britain in Europe: The Emergence of Transnational Discourses in Contemporary British Literature and working on a new project concerned with “Europe in the Anglophone Settler Imagination after 1989”.

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Herbillon Marie

Michelle de Kretser’s Multicultural Australia in The Life to Come: A Genuinely Alter/native Space?

In spatial terms, The Life to Come (2017), the Australian (but Sri-Lankan-born) author Michelle de Kretser’s fifth novel, which received the Miles Franklin Award in 2018, is arguably a global one: focusing in particular on the travels and transnational connections of Pippa Reynolds, a cosmopolitan Australian writer, it includes characters of various nationalities and origins, as well as scenes set in countries as diverse as Australia, France and Sri Lanka.

While De Kretser contrasts Australia’s rural landscapes, where some white Australian citizens are shown to be haunted by blatant Aboriginal absences (a case of historical denial that is interestingly paralleled, in the text, with France’s repression of its own imperial past, involving the colonisation of Algeria and its painful aftermath), with more urbanised places like Sydney, she still questions the latter as spaces in which belonging remains highly racialised, not least for people of Sri-Lankan descent.

This paper, which will examine De Kretser’s subtle critique of Australia’s alleged multicultural modernity, will also look at the extent to which Asian Australian communities can contribute to constructing more inclusive alter/native spaces that broaden their adopted nation’s racial and cultural imaginary.

Marie Herbillon lectures in the English Department of the University of Liège. A member of Centre d’Enseignement et de Recherche en Études Postcoloniales (CEREP), she has completed a PhD entitled “Beyond the Line: Murray Bail’s Spatial Poetics” and published articles in international journals such as Commonwealth: Essays and Studies, Journal of Postcolonial Writing, The Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Antipodes: A Global Journal of Australian/New Zealand Literature. She is also the guest editor of “Australia-South Asia: Contestations and Remonstrances,” a special issue of the Journal of the European Association for Studies of Australia (JEASA 8.2, 2018). Her current research project addresses the themes of history and migration in J.M. Coetzee’s late fiction.

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Horakova Martina

Leah Purcell’s The Drover’s Wife as Alter/Native Canon

There is probably not much left to be said about Henry Lawson’s iconic short story “The Drover’s Wife” (1892), though the Lawson scholarship continues to be interested in the rather ingenious process of mythologizing both the man and his work. Equally notorious are the many playful rewritings, which have in one way or another voiced something particular about the time they were written in—from Murray Bail, Frank Moorhouse, Barbara Jefferis, Anne Gambling, Mandy Sayer, up to the recent edition of all versions by Frank Moorhouse (2017) and Ryan O’Neill’s latest, though certainly not last, collection of 99 reinterpretations of the story in his The Drover’s Wives (2018). My presentation focuses on the theatrical spin written by actor, writer and director Leah Purcell. The play The Drover’s Wife in which Purcell played the lead, premiered in Sydney’s Belvoir Theater in September 2016, attracting enough commercial attention for Purcell and her troupe to start developing the play into a TV miniseries and possibly a feature film produced by one of the Hollywood studios.

The main source for this rewriting the story is, expectedly, a much larger and significant presence of Indigeneity. What in Lawson’s canonical text remains elusive and ultimately ambivalent (a treacherous Black who builds a hollow woodpile and the midwife Black Mary who helps the wife deliver her baby), is brought in Purcell’s writing to the spotlight. Not only does the play introduce the character of Yadaka, Aboriginal fugitive accused of white woman’s murder, but eventually the drover’s wife herself is revealed to have Indigenous origin, being Black Mary’s daughter. This powerful twist implicates several things: a tour de force of frontier violence with disturbing and haunting images of racism, rape, lynching, and murder, the play unflinchingly confronts the very foundations of established literary canon as well as national history, providing an alter/native to both.

Martina Horakova is based at Masaryk University in the Czech Republic where she teaches and does research in contemporary Australian and Canadian literature, particularly Indigenous and settler narratives. She published Inscribing Difference and Resistance: Indigenous Women’s Personal Non-fiction and Life Writing in Australia and North America (2017) and is currently working on a book manuscript on settler’s memoirs of belonging in Australia.

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Hu Dan

Identity and Sense of Belonging of Chinese Australians: a case study of Labor Party’s wechat engagement

Australia’s Labor Party Leader Bill Shorten made an unprecedented move to engage with Chinese Australian voters on 27 March 2019, when he created a chat group on WeChat, the paramount brand of social media among the Chinese, and did a 40-minute discussion with the 500 group members on Labor’s policies.

This presentation intends to take this as a case study to illustrate how the greater Chinese Australian community (including not only those from the Mainland, HKSAR, Taiwan, but also those with Chinese descent from South-East Asian countries) perceive their own identity and their sense of belonging.

Analysis will first be made on the makeup of the 500-member group, the members’ place of living, origin and cultural identity. Then discourse analysis will be conducted on the discussion in the group from the time the group was created, all the way to three days after the Labor-initiated group chat, when Labor people left the group.

Among other questions, focus will be put on the “Chinese-ness” and “Australian-ness” perceived by the group members, as demonstrated by the discussions. Opinions expressed will also be linked to their background so as to paint a clearer picture of the perception of their own identity and sense of belonging held by a certain segment of Chinese Australians.

Ms. HU teaches “Australian Economy and Its Economic Relations with China”, the only course in China featuring Australian economy and bilateral economic relations, in the country’s largest Australian Studies Centre at Beijing Foreign Studies University. She works as Assistant Professor and Deputy Director there, as well as Deputy General Secretary of the Chinese Association for Australian Studies. She has chaired or participated in several projects on China-Australia (economic) relations, with funding from the National Social Sciences Fund, Ministry of Education and Foundation on Australian Studies in China. She has been an active commentator on Australia-related issues on media and thinktanks, including China’s national TV and radio CCTV and CRI, Jiefang Daily, SBS, Financial Review, Reuters, UTS ACRI and La Trobe Asia Institute. She is also Co-Deputy Chief-Editor of Blue Book of Australia and Co-Executive Chief-Editor of Journal of Australian Studies in China. She is on the Editorial Board of InASA’s Journal of Australian Studies.

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Humphreys Sheridan

Two wealthy European women travel from England to Australia with their young Aboriginal servant seated on the ground beside them in this 19th century illustration

This paper will detail how research inspired by one picture impacted a multi-disciplinary approach to screenwriting scholarship, a historiographical and creative process that is also a way of confronting indigenous invisibility, and doing something about it.

In 2019, a beautifully illustrated book was published: Women: Our History, with a foreword by none other than Lucy Worsley and a few pages by Sheridan Humphreys (ie, me). On page 193, in the section about women emigrants to Australia and New Zealand during the settler colonial period, there was an intriguing picture with the above caption.

As a starting point to inspire a fictional story, this is a perfect image. The source is mysterious, the artist unknown, there is a huge question over the location and the destination, and the identities are unconfirmed or obscured. One woman is Black, two women are White. Perhaps it is 1888, perhaps not.

I wrote and researched these pages for Women: Our History, where the image with this caption appeared, but I did not choose the image. It became a starting point to develop a fictional story. Perhaps the image chose me.

Because it also revealed something troubling to my practice-led research: in my aim to try to write Indigenous Australian protagonists in a fictional historical drama set in Britain, in my obsession to write leading roles in historical drama for actors of colour, I forgot something. I made my character a young man. I forgot all about gender. This paper will explore how and why that mattered.

Sheridan Humphreys : I grew up in Sydney, Australia and Kundiawa, Papua New Guinea. Now I live on the edge of a farm in Surrey, England with my dog Shaz, a retired greyhound. I am a creative writer and researcher and currently a Visiting Lecturer in Screenwriting at the University of Greenwich and at Royal Holloway, University of London. I am also working on a practice-led PhD in Screenwriting at the Menzies Australia Institute, King’s College London. My background is in theatre. First I trained as a performer and then worked in the theatre industry as a publicist for many of the UK’s leading new writing companies including Talawa, Tamasha and Paines Plough, and the dance company Candoco. My writing has been published in The Stage, The Guardian and BBC online and my plays have been performed at Edinburgh Festival and on tour in the UK. In 2017, I was selected to participate in CLOSR, a six-month film development scheme led by Raising Films.

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Idle Helen

Theory into practice: outside in

In a Manchester library a story of James Cook is locked behind glass; it is a first edition of Hawkesworth’s 1777 account of the voyage that came to shore at what is now Australia. The journal recounts the British voyage outwith the Pillars of Hercules and is held within the collection of The Portico Library, a purpose-built independent library established in 1806.

This paper outlines an intervention staged in that library to propose possible connections between ideas that led to Cook’s voyage and ideas encountered on that voyage, to challenge dominant narratives about James Cook’s voyages of ‘discovery’.

Ideas were exchanged locally, brought back to Europe and incorporated into existing knowledge systems. Or were overwritten or ignored.

The methodology of the intervention was cast as a decolonising manoeuvre to promote multiple knowledges that could be found in The Library. Holdings were linked to accounts of the voyage to trouble epistemological assumptions and so encourage alternative understandings of what knowledges were abroad at this time. Here we may approach and acknowledge indigenous knowledge systems that are beyond the edges of Europe but came to inform new meaning-making and ideas.

This contributes to the discourses generated by Brook Andrew’s upcoming Sydney Biennale 2020 Nirin (Wiradjuri word translates as ‘edges’) that places Indigenous languages and ontologies central to meaning-making within an established mode of exhibition. In both situations new space is created in an existing space whereby the dominant ecology can be challenged physically and intellectually.

Helen Idle: PhD (Australian Studies) King’s College London 2017; MA Visual Culture, University of Westminster 2005. Helen is a Project Curator and Research Associate at Menzies Australia Institute, King’s College London. Helen produced Entwined: Knowledge and Power in the Age of Cook (2018) for The Portico Library.She contributed a chapter to Castejon, etal, Ngapartji, Ngapartji. In turn, In turn: Ego-histoire, Europe and Indigenous Australia (ANU Press, 2014); published in Meanjin (73:3, 2014) and was co-editor of Australian Studies Journal on Australian Art (7, 2015). She is on the Editorial Advisory Board for Australian Studies Journal (Zeitschrift für Australienstudien).

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Indelicato Maria Elena

Beyond Settler Belonging: Violence and Migration in the Borderlands of North Queensland

The foundational myth of a pre-WWII white Australia is perpetuated in the grounding fiction of the historiography of Italian migration in Australia: Italians’ innocence from the violence enacted against the country’s First Peoples. Deconstructing this double myth is necessary to fully understand who Italian migrants are vis-a-vis a country where they cannot but exist in a marginal position but also, and more importantly, unravel the settler colonial conditions which overdetermine their belonging to Australia.

This paper will do so by taking the case of three South Sea Islanders attacking an Italian farmer in the city of Ingham in 1927. In unfolding the individual histories of those involved in the incident against the wider context of anti-Italian sentiment, this paper will demonstrate the implication of Italian migrants in the violent subjugation of local Indigenous populations as well as the descendants of indentured South Sea Islander workers. Moving from the personal to the political, from the past of imperial conquests to the present of multicultural debates on national identity and history, this paper will also advocate, more generally, the importance of exploring what it means to belong according to an historical lens that is also transnational and relational.

Maria Elena Indelicato received her Ph.D. from the Department of Gender and Cultural Studies, University of Sydney. Besides her monograph Australia’s New Migrants: International Students’ History of Affective Encounters with the Border, Indelicato has published in race feminist and cultural studies journals such as Outskirts: Feminism Along the Edge, Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, Chinese Cinemas, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and Paedagogica Historica. She is also the editor of the ACRAWSA blog.

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Jensen Lars

Alter whiteness. The rise (and rise) of Australian far right nationalism

My thoughts on this paper were partly prompted by the Christchurch massacre, but it is not what this paper will be about. I am interested in exploring the short and long term rise of what I will provisionally call “whiteness extremism” in Australia. I want to discuss it in terms of its “Australianness”, and as part of a wider phenomenon in the club of nations to which Australia belongs as a white and as a settler colonial society. I am particularly interested in how articulations of whiteness in its extreme forms are related to “softer” more broadly embraced – and endorsed – versions of whiteness, and how oscillations of extreme and soft whiteness enable whiteness to (as I will argue) persist across time, as a component of, rather than an aberrant form of, modernity. Since this is an EASA conference, I will pay some limited attention to the relationship between Australian whiteness and similar discourses in Europe. Finally, I will discuss how the usage of terms such as “white”, “whiteness”, “right wing extremism”, “terrorist attacks” channels the phenomena they represent into already accepted discourses that also contain them precisely in terms of alienating extremeness that allows for softer more “benign” forms of “concerned citizens”.

Lars Jensen is Associate Professor in Cultural Encounters, Roskilde University. He has researched Australian Studies in various shapes and forms since the 1990s, interrupted by other research interests in Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies and beyond. He has written and co-edited a number of books and written even more articles. He is currently researching a monograph provisionally titled, Remoteness, which in spite of its title will be exploring Australia from “inside”.

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Kilroy Peter

Alternative institutions: decolonization discourse in Australia and the UK

Despite the long theoretical and empirical history of decolonising nations, calls to decolonize a wide range of institutions and practices have become increasingly prominent in recent years, particularly since the Rhodes Must Fall and Why is My Curriculum White? campaigns. Everything from schools and universities through to methodologies and academic disciplines have been subject to such calls. One element that most campaigns have in common, though, is a concern to effect substantive rather than superficial institutional or practical change. This plays out in educational, health and political institutions, but also increasingly in cultural institutions like museums and galleries. A growing trend has been a shift away from the language of “inclusion”, “access”, “diversity” and “widening participation” towards the language of “decolonisation”. Activists, scholars and practitioners are increasingly asking: how does one effect long-term, systemic institutional change amidst the lingering, structural impacts of colonialism, and the relative absence of public debate on such legacies? Is such decolonisation internal or external to such institutions? And is it possible to decolonize institutions in the absence of broader political-economic change? Using examples from Australia and the UK, this paper will analyse decolonisation discourse within both contexts, and consider what a genuinely decolonised institution might look like. It will explore the parallels, overlaps and points of divergence between Australia and the UK, and more particularly between Australian First Nations and UK BAME communities, institutions and strategies. And it will ask: what is the relationship between such institutional change and broader patterns of self-determination, sovereignty, reparation and reconciliation?

Peter Kilroyis a Lecturer in Cultural Studies and Cultural Sociology in the Department of

Sociology at City, University of London. Prior to that, he was a Research Associate and British

Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at the Menzies Australia Institute, King’s College London. Peter

works across the fields of British and Australian Cultural Studies, and Indigenous and

Postcolonial Studies. He has published on Australian First Nations media, history and politics,

and is a former editor of parallax and Ex Plus Ultra journals. Peter is currently co-editing a

book on Australian screen media (Screening Australia: Culture, Media, Context).

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Kirne Jack

Agricultural Catastrophes: Writing the Anthropocene in Carrie Tiffany’s Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living and Kim Scott’s Taboo

Agricultural fictions have played an intrinsic role in interrogating human relationships with the landscape, in settler societies especially, often perpetuating and creating moral ideals of nationhood, frontier and modernity. Radical changes in technologies, both mechanical and chemical, particularly in the last century, have also modified the landscape in a way that is not so different to geoengineering practices now being flagged as a possible response to climate change. In this paper, I will look toward Carrie Tiffany’s Everyman’s Rules for Scientific Living (2005)and Kim Scott’s Taboo (2017) and using a post-agricultural lens, I seek to outline how these novels separately imagine post and emergent catastrophes in engineered environments. Specific attention will be applied to the possibilities of the Post-Natural environments imagined in each work, and how they conceptualise settler and Indigenous futures within them. In conclusion, the paper will try to forward a series of strategies for writing about geological catastrophe that does not rely on tropes of science fiction or apocalyptic framings.

Jack Kirne is a PhD candidate at Deakin University in the School of Communication and Creative Arts. His fiction has been featured in Meanjin and Ibis House (forthcoming). His critical work has appeared in Cinder.

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Klepač Tihana

Rosa Praed’s My Australian Girlhood as an ‘Alter’ Space

Ghassan Hage in his Alterpolitics defines settler colonial societies as warring societies wherein “war is no longer a transmitted state but a permanent feature of the social situation” and “the whole of society from its economy to its culture becomes part of the reproduction of this permanent state of war.” The term perfectly describes the late nineteenth-century Queensland frontier described in Rosa Praed’s My Australian Girlhood: Sketches and Impression of Bush Life. Though published in 1902, the book describes the events that date back a generation. It was the high tide of British imperialism, when most British people believed in the natural superiority of the Anglo-Saxon race and its “manifest destiny”. Preventing its fulfilment stood the indigenous population of the continent unwilling to give up their living space, their culture, their economic and social system. Thus when Praed describes a young girl’s view of the indigenous population, the Myall Creek murders, the Frazer massacre she is creating “the savage slot” (Hage), a description of radical cultural alterity, one that does not exist in our Western structures based on binary oppositions, one that is so different that it disorients us. Yet it is otherness that has something to say to us. Namely, Praed’s text attaches no easy blame to the brutalities committed by both blacks and whites on the frontier, which won Praed the attribute of an “unpopular radical.” Aware of the weakness of her (female) voice in patriarchal Victorian age, this progressive intellectual creates her “alter” space of existence, an other reality, in the, traditionally innocuous genre, the autobiography of childhood.

Tihana Klepačis assistant professor at the Department of English, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb where she teaches 19^th century Australian literature. She has published papers on Australian exploration narratives, and early Australian women’s writing. She has co-edited Irish mirror for Croatian literature: theoretical assumptions, literary comparisons, reception with Ljiljana Ina Gjurgjan, and English Studies from Archives to Prospects: Volume 1 – Literature and Cultural Studies with Stipe Grgas and Martina Domines Veliki. Her research interests include nineteenth-century white settler literature of Australia, and women’s life writing.

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Klik Lukas

Multiperspectival Fiction, the Plurination and Intersectional Concerns

In this paper, I will argue that through their aesthetic structure contemporary Australian multiperspectival novels, such as Christos Tsiolkas’s The Slap (2008), Gail Jones’s Five Bells (2011) or Steven Lang’s Hinterland (2017), present a specifically powerful critique of the nation thought of as a monolithic and monologic entity by responding to the visible diversification of Australian society. These novels embody what, drawing on the insights of cultural and postcolonial studies as well as Caroline Levine’s notion of new formalism, I call the ‘plurination’, an understanding of the nation that reconceptualises it as a network that takes into consideration the multiplicity of potentially conflicting versions of it coexisting simultaneously. Methodologically, considering that the variety of subject positions within the plurination is determined by a complex interplay of numerous social identities, I propose to employ a form of narratology that can be termed intersectional. Here, in contrast to other theoretical contributions so far, I make use of the concept of perspective structure as described by Nünning and Surkamp. Such an approach highlights that the manner in which literary characters approach the world is necessarily linked to the ways in which they are located with regard to a variety of different identity categories. By extending the concept of perspective structure to take into account character constellation in more general terms and issues on the discourse-level, in particular focalisation, too, it, then, becomes possible to explore how dominance and marginality operate in the construction of the plurination in multiperspectival fiction.

I am currently a research assistant and PhD student at the English department of the University of Vienna, Austria. My research interest is in the field of Australian literature. In my PhD project, I focus on contemporary Australian multiperspectival novels and analyse how they reflect the diversification of present-day Australia through their form.

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Kušnír Jaroslav,

Native and Regional Spaces in Kim Scott´s Taboo

In many of his novels, Kim Scott does not depict only various aspects of Aboriginal cultural identity, but also a connection of the Aboriginal (Noongar) identity with the Australian West. In his Taboo, Scott depicts Noongar people from the Australian West trying to revisit a taboo place on which the massacre based on racial tension between the Aboriginal and white people took place in the past. The journey to the taboo place becomes a symbolic recuperation of the past and its alter/native rediscovery, but also a symbolic exploration of a region, its physical, cultural and spiritual specificities as connected with both Aboriginal and White cultures and cultural identitities. This paper will analyze Scott´s depiction of the Australian West and its connection with a formation of a specificity of both Aboriginal and white cultural identity in their mutual interaction through history. The paper will also focus on Scott´s use of imagery and narrative techniques connected with Aboriginal characters which undermine traditional Western concept of time and history and thus create an alternative vision of both history and the world. At the same time, however, the paper will analyze the Australian West as a possible “common space” representing the cultural specificity of contemporary cultural identity of both Aboriginal and white people.

Jaroslav Kušnír is Professor of American, British and Australian literature at the University of Prešov, Slovakia, where he teaches such courses as American literature, British literature, Australian short story, literary theory and criticism. His research includes American postmodern and contemporary fiction, Australian postmodern fiction, and critical reception of American, British and Australian literature in Slovakia. He is the author of Poetika americkej postmodernej prózy (Richard Brautigan and Donald Barthelme)[Poetics of American Postmodern Fiction: Richard Brautigan and Donald Barthelme]. Prešov, Slovakia: Impreso, 2001; American Fiction: Modernism-Postmodernism, Popular Culture, and Metafiction. Stuttgart, Germany: Ibidem, 2005; Australian Literature in Contexts. Banská Bystrica, Slovakia: Trian, 2003; and Postmodernism and After: New Sensibility, Media, Pop Culture, and Communication Technologies in Anglophone Literatures. Nitra:ASPA, 2015.

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Lazaroo Simone

Writing and Photographing Alter/native Western Australian Individuals and Places

In this paper, I seek to explore the ways in which personal observations and experiences of Indigenous Australians throughout my life as a Singaporean Eurasian migrant in Western Australia, from the mid-1960s to the present, informed and complicated both my sense of belonging and my fiction writing.

I first take a new look at how I remember and write about my own and my family’s first encounters with urban Aboriginal people living in the Perth metropolitan suburbs in the mid-1960s to mid-1970s, years that bridged government policies including the final years of the White Australia Policy, and the first years of multiculturalism. I then look at my encounters with urban and remote regional Aboriginal people in the mid-1980s, including a brief spell living with a suburban family who identified as Aboriginal and my subsequent choice in the mid-1980s to teach indigenous children in a space designated as a ‘remote Aboriginal community school’, but designed and controlled by the white educational authorities down in Perth.

Secondly, I reflect on how further life experiences underpinned accounts in my fiction; for example, in my second novel of a young Singaporean woman’s time in Broome, after World War Two, as the guest of her white pearler fiancé (The Australian Fiancé, 2000). I also explore how my work in the mid to late 1980s in the WA Education Department as a photographer and writer of educational magazines for Aboriginal children influenced my fiction. Taking photographs of Aboriginal people and the landscapes they lived in, I thought subsequently about how photographs could be used both to objectify people and to give people a stronger sense of themselves and ‘where they come from’.

Finally, I consider the question: how did I manage in my fiction writing, an ethical position toward indigenous perspectives from a position that is non-indigenous, but not-white either? In short, my aim as a Eurasian Australian writer is to explore afresh the ‘stories’ I have made and the history that has made me, to rethink difference and belonging.

Dr Simone Lazaroo’s award-winning novels and most of her short stories have explored individuals’ struggles for meaning at the juncture of cultures and in consumerist societies.

Her short fiction has been published in Australia, USA, England, Cuba and in a bilingual chapbook, Duty Free (2015 Oviedo, Spain: KRK Ediciones). Her novels and short fiction have been taught in Australian, American and Spanish university courses. She is a senior lecturer in English and Creative Writing at Murdoch University and lives in Fremantle, Western Australia. She is currently writing two novels exploring cross-cultural relationships and loss, one set in contemporary Lisbon and Fremantle and the other in Singapore and Australia from the 1950s to 2018. Her latest short story, Night Shifting, was published in Westerly journal, (University of Western Australia), in July 2019 and her second novel, The Australian Fiancé, is currently optioned for film.

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Lee Christopher and Lara Lamb

Hindsight: Repatriating photographs and film in the Gulf of Papua New Guinea

This Hindsight project seeks to make a contribution to an interdisciplinary field of study, which is interested in interrogating and addressing the legacies of colonialism. It takes the form of a specific case study of an expedition by the explorer, journalist, photographer, and cinematographer Frank Hurley to Papua New Guinea in the 1920s. We want to understand the cultural, ethnographic, and historical conditions that influenced the collection and representation of these images and objects, and to return them to their source communities for comment and testimony. In taking these cultural materials back to the Urama and Kerewo peoples represented in and through them, we seek to understand the ongoing effects and affects of this colonial process on their communities. We argue that in order to reach a more accurate, representative, and equable understanding of what takes place in exchanges such as that which occurred between Hurley’s expedition and the Kerewo and Urama peoples, we need to know more about the agencies through which they were colonised and their response to those agencies. Such an understanding requires an inter-disciplinary interest in history, biography, anthropology, ethnography, politics, communications, and representation.

Christopher Lee is a Professor of English in the School of Languages, Humanities and Social Science at Griffith University and a member of the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research. Chris has published widely on postcolonial and Australian cultural history developing a special, interdisciplinary interest in the social purchase of settler colonial mythologies. His most recent books are Post-Colonial Heritage and Settler Well-Being (Cambria 2018) and Trauma and Public Memory (coedited with Jane Goodall, Palgrave MacMillan, 2015).

Lara Lamb is an Associate Professor in Anthropology at the University of Southern Queensland. She has been working in Papua New Guinea from 2008 to the present and has published a wide range of academic papers that have expanded our understanding of the Gulf Province significantly. Prior to working in Papua New Guinea, Lara has had a long history of working with Indigenous communities on the central Queensland coast and in Arnhem Land, where she was engaged with ethnography, oral history and archaeology. Currently, she is the recipient of an ARC Discovery Grant (2019-2022) to conduct ethnographic and archaeological investigations on the Great Papuan Plateau.

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Lencznarowicz Jan

John Dunmore Lang and the Indigenous Australians

John Dunmore Lang, a Scottish Presbyterian clergyman who settled in Sydney in 1823, played an important role in the religious, political and cultural life of New South Wales until his death in 1878, and helped to create two new colonies: Victoria and Queensland. He made a significant contribution to the rise of early Australian identity and laid the foundations for Australian nationalism and republicanism.

Lang consistently and vigorously encouraged the European, overwhelmingly British settlement of Australia. He was convinced of a glorious future for Australia, which he foresaw as an empire in the Southern Hemisphere and a booming economy. A great believer in progress, he envisaged the disappearance of the Aboriginal population “before the progress of civilization” brought by European colonists. At the same time, he accused Europeans of the mass extermination of the Aborigines and the taking of their land. Unlike many of his contemporaries he considered them “bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh”.

Drawing on Lang’s books and pamphlets as well as some of his articles, sermons and speeches published in the colonial press, the proposed paper analyses his attitude towards the Indigenous Australians. The focus is on the way in which he defined them and related them on both social and moral levels to European colonists. In order to explain Lang’s views some space is also given to contemporary religious ideas and ideological concepts that influenced his position as well as to the historical context of colonial Australia.

Jan Lencznarowicz, Ph.D. is an associate professor at the Institute for American Studies and Polish Diaspora, Jagiellonian University, Kraków. His main areas of research are: Polish political emigration, Polish ethnic group in Australia, history of Australia and political myths and nationalism in modern history.

Jan Lencznarowicz is the author of three books: Jałta. W kręgu mitów założycielskich polskiej emigracji politycznej po II wojnie światowej. 1944-1956, [Yalta as the Foundation Myth of the Polish Political Emigration 1944-1956], Kraków 2009; Australia, Warszawa 2005; Prasa i społeczność polska w Australii. 1928-1980, [The Polish Press and Polish Community in Australia. 1928-1980], Kraków 1994. His publications include numerous articles in Polish and in English.

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Marshall Brye

A Lock & Leprosorium in Northern Queensland

From 1923 until the late 1970s, the Queensland government operated a quarantine station which dealt specifically with controlling ‘diseased’ Indigenous peoples from across the state (Parsons; Qld Dpt of Heritage & Environment; Evans). The legalities of this form of control and disempowerment have never truly been investigated, but Fantome Island does show the practical application of Australian eugenics policy.

The treatment by the Qld government towards Indigenous people has been debated/discussed/espoused by numerous humanities/social science academics and various interested parties over the last 40 years. Despite the well-known culture wars of the 1990s, numerous agents such as academics, politicians, social commentators, media and historians (to an extent) still to this day are engaging in a dichotomy which accelerates their careers and build upon their profession. The dichotomy is that the 20^th century Indigenous v. non-Indigenous relationships were points of contest and conjecture dependant on ideologies and/or attitudes towards Indigenous Australians as subjects to examine. Indigenous academics or Indigenous experts have consistently been pushed aside and authority over Indigenous content still sits with usurpers.

This is evident when looking at 20^th century Qld Indigenous v. non-Indigenous interactions from the discipline of archaeology. My presentation, engages in this period with an examination of Fantome Island. Relatively unknown in comparison to its neighbour Palm Island; I will discuss the historical and archaeological significance of Fantome Island and explain how Indigenous archaeologists are now taking ownership of telling the story of ethnic cleansing, unethical experimentation, genocide, invasion and importantly survival and retaliation that is 20^th Century north Qld history/heritage.

Brye Marshall is a RHD student in the department of Archaeology at the University of Sydney. His research project is investigating a relatively unknown quarantine station, specifically used to control and separate Indigenous people in Qld during the 20^th Century. Brye is also a member of the Australian Archaeology Association, a representative of the Barki-Darling Archaeology sub-committee, Executive member of the Pacific Indigenous Archaeologists Association Think Tank and a NIRKN member.

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Menzies Isa

Affect, autochthony, and the Australian horse discourse: narratives of identity and belonging

The cultural significance of the horse functions as one of the cornerstone narratives in the production and performance of Australian national identity. From museum exhibitions to the Melbourne Cup, the notion that the horse is meaningful to Australians continues to be perpetuated, yet the exact nature of this significance remains nebulous and imprecise.

Drawing on the recent ‘brumby debates’, which centre on the population of feral horses inhabiting the unique alpine region of Kosciuszko National Park, I examine the narratives of affect, and concepts of autochthony, which characterise discussions of horses in the Australian landscape. I argue that this ‘horse discourse’ functions to mediate anxieties of belonging among white, Anglo-European Australians. In Australia’s settler-colonial context, the uncomfortable truths surrounding the continent’s bloody colonisation are interwoven with the problematics of belonging. The paper will reveal the historical role of the horse as a colonial tool of dispossession, unpacking the way this function has been sublimated and celebratory narratives of equine significance have been substituted for darker truths.

Drawing from research undertaken for my doctoral thesis, this paper contributes to debates on national identity and belonging in a settler-colonial society such as Australia.

Isa Menzies is currently completing her PhD at the Australian National University (ANU). Her research focuses on representations of the horse in Australian identity narratives, and its role in the national imagination.

Isa holds a Master of Arts (Museum Studies) from the University of Sydney, and has spent 15 years working with cultural heritage, both in Australia and internationally. She has worked across a range of areas, from exhibition development to collection management, and has also taught museology subjects at the ANU.

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Muecke Stephen

Ways of Life: Knowledge Transfer and Indigenous Walking Trails

Indigenous Heritage Trails are a growing phenomenon in Australia. They come in all shapes and sizes, from mere signage to—in the case of the famous Lurujarri trail out of Broome, Western Australia—a nine-day immersive experience walking the beach with one of the Goolarabooloo family groups. Here people experience the beautiful Indian Ocean coastline, extensive dinosaur footprints, storytelling, and meals of freshly-caught mangrove crab, dugong and turtle. These trails are far more than ‘tourism products’. For the Aboriginal families, with all ages present, they enact intergenerational knowledge transfer. Palaeontologists learn that the dinosaur footprints are also the traces of the emu ancestor, Marala, and their discipline adjusts its epistemological parameters accordingly. Walking with one’s ‘arts of noticing’ on alert deepens and extends both European and Aboriginal knowledge, as they find agencies that can transfer and translate the multi-functionality inherent in the ecological ‘pluriverse’ that is this continent-wide network of dreaming tracks. Could this experiential model of knowledge transfer represent a path away from the nineteenth-century model of knowledge collection, storage and display that we find in museums?

Stephen Muecke is Jury Professor of English Language and Literature, School of Humanities, University of Adelaide, a research leadership position.He has been a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities since 1998, and is Head of the Communication and Culture Section. Professor Muecke has written pioneering and sometimes prize-winning books, including Reading the Country, No Road (bitumen all the way)] and Ancient & Modern: Time, Culture and Indigenous Philosophy. He has written or edited 19 books (not including several translations from French intellectuals) and numerousarticles and chapters.
He has spoken as a keynote at conferences around the world, including New York, Chicago, Berlin, London, Paris, Halle, Kuala Lumpur, Kolkata, and Kingston, Jamaica.

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Page Jean

Knowing the name of things: inscribing the tourist gaze in Murray Bail’s Homesickness

In his post-modern novel Homesickness (1980)Australian novelist Murray Bail depicts a group of Australian tourists on a package tour through diverse countries — including Senegal, the UK and Ecuador and in cities — London, New York and Moscow.

In addressing the archetype of the tourist, for which the mobile Australian is judged suitably representative, Bail explores the various perspectives of his diverse group in their picaresque encounters with unfamiliar, Other landscapes and people. In particular he focusses on the nature of their descriptions of such encounters in an increasingly virtual or curated world of global tourism (its museums, guides, exhibitions). This is seen in the dialogic, arguably appropriating, acts of naming, identifying, epistolary accounts (notably in postcards) and also photography, including by the group’s tellingly blind photographer.

I argue that Bail’s tourist group can be considered akin to the post-colonial settler described in The Empire Writes Back (Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin, 1989), albeit in a global situation in which foreign nations and people are viewed as Other. This paper examines the way Bail examines the nature of human apprehension of unfamiliar and familiar worlds through the binaries of distance/closeness, as well as though ratiocinative, visual, classifying, collecting impulses as distinct from a more chaotic and intuitive submergence. A central anchoring, comparative reference point is the familiar (the Australian home, landscape, vegetation, in its various stereotypes) and the alternative counter viewpoints of the stable, of non-travellers.

While the novel’s overriding slant tends to be sardonic and reductive, the paper addresses how its accumulating effect works towards questioning what lies beneath a contemporary impetus to travel: — restlessness, hedonism, diversion, uncertainty, seeking knowledge (of self and reality) as well as an understanding about what constitutes home.

Jean Page (PhD), is a Researcher at University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies (ULICES) who recently completed her doctoral thesis at U. Lisbon on the Australian poet James McAuley “The many voices urging: Transformation, Paradox and Continuity in the Poetry of James McAuley.” Her research focusses on poetry and short fiction in the other English literatures (Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, South Asia, South Africa) also genre, notably travel literature, and perspectives on the postcolonial, diaspora and spatiality. With ULICES Research Group 4 she is involved in the project Representations of Home (RHOME). She participates in Australian and European conferences on Australian literary studies and has published in their journals.

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Palleau-Papin Françoise

The weight of words in Alexis Wright’s works

« The Toyota, resurrected from Uncle’s demise, was so loaded down with the weight of Aunty’s rumours, the axles almost touched the ground. » (Carpentaria, p.115)

Alexis Wright has a unique way of doing things with words, of reactivating dead metaphors, of mixing literal and figurative meanings, and of using expressions like artifacts in her similes and comparisons. She thus weighs in on the way words may hurt and have actual impact on her characters, on the world they inhabit, and eventually, on her readers. For instance, the « stuffed mullet » comparison she reactivates, to capture the desperate expression of « the old fishing men at Desperance » (Carpentaria, p.262), gives actual metonymical power to the classic expression, becoming the men’s emblem, while she enlarges the animal metaphor to other species and categories of the down-and-out to further characterize them, such as that of “flea-bitten dogs” –offering a humorous zoological portrayal of the disasters springing from the gambling madness in the community.

This paper proposes to engage in a stylistic study of Wright’s extensive metaphorical usage, in an attempt to categorize her linguistic creativity, focusing mainly on her works of fiction Carpentaria and The Swan Book, but not limited to fiction (Grog War will be included in the study, to a lesser extent).

Françoise Palleau-Papin is Professor of American Literature at the University of Paris 13, where she currently chairs the English Department. After completing a PhD dissertation on Willa Cather, she has published a critical study of My Ántonia, a monograph on David Markson, and edited a critical study of William T. Vollmann’s novel The Rifles. She recently co-edited An Introduction to Anglophone Theatre, and has written numerous articles on contemporary American authors. Her passion for Australian literature began when she read Patrick White as a student, and she has been a lover of Australian cinema and literature ever since, but this is the first time she is making a professional incursion into Australian Studies.

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Polak Iva

Desert in Claire G. Coleman’s Terra Nullius as an alter/native space of Australia’s futurity

Claire G. Coleman’s 2017 novel Terra Nullius initially reads as a fictional account of Australia’s colonial history by using a well-known natives/settler binary to narrate about the mission years, punitive squads and survival of desert-dwelling Aboriginals who were trying to escape the coloniser’s reach. However, half way into the novel, the meaning of the work skids since it transpires that the narrator has been “cheating” by creating the reality effect (Barthes) of the colonial era since the actual story-now takes place beyond the year 2041.

Terra Nullius, as it turns out, is not a world of Australian Aboriginals and Anglo-Celtic settlers/colonisers, but a world of barely surviving terrans and technologically advanced extraterrestrials. This is a futuristic post-racial space of the much drier continent that was once called Australia, wherein the arrival of the extraterrestrials, who “came in peace, their peace” (Coleman) has eradicated racism and hate among the earthlings. Those terrans who have survived aliens’ diseases and urban concentration camps have withdrawn deep into the desert.

Hence, it will be argued that the desert enacted in the novel as the only safe haven for humans constitutes an alter/native futuristic space marked by so-called strong multiculturalism, whose most important principle, according to Stanley Fish, “is not rationality or some other supracultural universal, but tolerance”. As the work of speculative fiction, the novel also poses a question as to whether futuropolis, a common trope in science fiction, can provide a frame for such an alter/native space which rethinks difference and belonging.

Iva Polak is Associate Professor in the Department of English, University of Zagreb, Croatia, where she teaches Australian studies, theory of the fantastic, contemporary British fiction and fiction of the Anthropocene. Her most recent publication is Futuristic Worlds in Australian Aboriginal Fiction (Peter Lang, 2017) and “The Swan Book: Indigenous Cli-Fi” in Cli-Fi. A Companion, eds. Axel Goodbody and Adeline Johns-Putra (Peter Lang, 2019). Her current project concerns Anthropocene fiction and film.

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Potter Miriam

Voss, Seeing and Reading Alter-Land

Voss, Patrick White’s novel of a scientific expedition into the ‘unexplored’ ‘dead heart’ of inland Australia and a long distance love affair, begins with two one-sentence paragraphs. The second paragraph starts with the conjunction “And”. In this paper I argue we thus, immediately enter into a story that uses stylistic tools as narrative devices to invite the reader to continually explore that which is seldom explored. Surprised that Voss would walk from Sydney to Potts Point Laura Trevelyan observes: “But monotonous” (White, 1977:10). Her aesthetic judgement of the surrounding environment prompts Voss’s reply “I am at home”, likening it to his hometown in Germany adding, as a complete sentence, “Sandy” (White, 1977:13).

In 1840s Sydney the sandy soil is being progressively potted and re-potted to cultivate and foster European gardening, agricultural and scientific undertakings. This first conversation between the future lovers shows that they draw elementary semantic distinctions about their environment according to their experiences of the world. White, fascinated by the chronicles and diaries of the times, explores the early Victorian age by sending his characters into uncharted territory to discover what the “stimulus of their surroundings” would wield (White, 1994:107).

Through an ecocritical lens, I argue that to read Voss is to be led to question preconceived knowledge and modes of thought and to recognise cultural continuities and discontinuities that led to present day “plastic garbage littering [our] backyards” (White, 1981:104). I demonstrate how through Dugald and Jackie, the expedition’s Indigenous guides, White posits in the textual geography of the novel alternative readings to feed our mind and our imagination with different modes of dwelling and belonging. White conveys that “knowledge was never a matter of geography. Quite the reverse, it overflows all maps that exist. Perhaps true knowledge only comes of death by torture in the country of the mind” (White, 1977: 446). Voss presents the reader with a larger system where distinctions between nature and culture cease to exist.

Miriam Potter is pursuing a Ph.D. on Patrick White’s fiction at the Australian National University and at Paris-Sorbonne. She has worked for Robin des Bois, a Non-Governmental Organisation, for over fifteen years and as an English lecturer at Paris-Sorbonne. Her career as an ecologist has paralleled her studies in history and literature. Her research is supported by an Australian Government Research Training Program scholarship.

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Rechniewski Elizabeth

The Commemorative Struggle over the ‘Foundational Wars’ of Australia: Boer Wars and Black Wars in the Memorial Landscape

The recent campaigns across Australia to ramp up memorialisation of the Boer Wars offer a striking example of “commemorative displacement” – the selective highlighting of certain forms of conflict to the exclusion of others, a displacement that is not only symbolic but often spatial as well. The commemorative agenda and memorial landscape of Australia was colonised throughout the twentieth century by a militaristic interpretation of its history, centred on the exploits of white soldiers who fought overseas in the service of the British Empire, as the Anzac legend so clearly illustrates. This commemorative policy constitutes a form of “displacement” whereby the foundational violence on which the nation was built is identified not as that deployed against the Indigenous peoples in the ‘Black Wars’, but as the battles fought overseas against a foreign enemy. This paper focuses on two periods in which the relationship between the Boer war and the Black Wars became particularly significant: the period around Federation in 1901 and the current revival of interest in the Boer war in a context where the national commemorative agenda is being challenged by advocates of memorialisation of the Black or Frontier Wars.

Elizabeth Rechniewski is Honorary Senior Lecturer in the School of Languages and Cultures at the University of Sydney. She has published widely on the political and commemorative uses of the national past, and on the remembrance of twentieth century war and colonial war in Australia, France, Cameroon and New Caledonia, including the commemoration of the role of Indigenous soldiers from these countries. Recent publications include “Remembering the Black Diggers: from the ‘great silence’ to an ‘excess of commemoration’?” in War Memories (McGill 2017); “Resénégalisation and the Representation of Black African Troops during World War One” in Commemorating Race and Empire (Liverpool UP 2018); “Why the War in Cameroon Never Took Place” in Seeking Meaning, Seeking Justice in the Post-Cold War World (Brill 2018).

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Renes Martin

Towards an Indigenous, alter/native paradigm of existence: Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book

Enlightenment thought keeps informing our decolonising present in Europe, and as Baden Offord e.a. (2014) argue, this is also the case for a white settler nation such as Australia, which naturally imported its mindset. The perseverance of an ideology of infinite, linear progress and European superiority finds its ultimate logic in globalisation, the increasingly international connectivity and circulation of capital and goods (Khair 2016), humans and information across and beyond increasingly porous national borders, which upsets our sense of comfort and security at our (national) home, and boosts our sense of vulnerability. We are building physical and legal walls to keep our privilege from the Foreign Other while refusing to acknowledge the disruptive impact of Europe’s massive settlement abroad since the start of the Modern Age, enabled by the sense of superiority provided by the development of civil and military technology. The discursive logic of an altruistic, benevolent Civilising and Christianising imperial mission to justify the West’s expansion has always been belied by the economic rationale of the obtention and exploitation of foreign resources, which eventually took us to two world wars, the subsequent creation of the United Nations and the European Union to ward off the dangers of ruthless economic competition between nation-states. By that time, Empire had led to the genocide of indigenous peoples around the world and the usurpation of their lands, destruction of their habitats, and traumatic displacement. Nowadays, through globalisation, the violent legacy of our imperial past returns to haunt us with finite resources, over-exploitation, harmful climate change, environmental destruction, and its corollary: uncontrollable migratory movements, and Indigenous literature is testimony to this. In the following I will address Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book as a profound critique of Western epistemology based on the ontological connection between Indigeneity and the land, which offers us a blueprint for a less harmful future as human species.

Martin Renes is an Associate Professor in English Studies at the University of Barcelona, Spain, and specialises in postcolonial literatures from Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. He co-directs the Australian and Transnational Studies Centre (CEAT), recognised as an official interdisciplinary, intercultural research centre within the university’s Faculty of Letters. He is involved in the organisation of research projects, regular conferences, lectures, and academic exchanges of postcolonial content and co-edits the CEAT’s online journals Coolabah and Blue Gum. He has chaired the European Association for Studies of Australia (EASA) since 2015.

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Rolls Mitchell.

The Slipperiness of Space: Distinguishing Difference from Disposition

Calls to imagine new ways of conceptualising space, difference, belonging and related praxis often pre-suppose extant and oppositional entrapments, emancipation from which is thought necessary for the realisation of some greater good. Overlooked in such exhortations is the fact that life, as the saying goes, goes on, and its going on is in the context of entanglements which produce ‘changing conditions of possibility,’ and that ‘social and cultural structures are reproduced’ within those changing conditions. More straightforwardly, incitements of the necessity to think anew on belonging and identity frequently overlook existing dynamics, and how these dynamics are sometimes already producing the very alternative spaces sought, albeit in ways that challenge taken-for-granted orthodoxies. This dynamic is perhaps most apparent—at least overtly—in the arena of Native Title and the distinction drawn between ‘historical’ and ‘traditional’ people. Although this is familiar terrain to anthropologists, more broadly the relevant tensions remain largely unknown or unacknowledged where so. This paper explores these dynamics.

Mitchell Rolls is senior lecturer in the School of Humanities, University of Tasmania, Hobart. With a background in cultural anthropology, he works across disciplines to draw attention to the contextual subtleties underlying contemporary cultural constructions, identity politics, relationships to place and related exigencies. He has published widely on these issues. His most recent monographs are Travelling Home, Walkabout Magazine and Mid-Twentieth-Century Australia (Anthem Press, 2016, co-authored with Associate Professor Anna Johnston), and Australian Indigenous Studies: Research and Practice, (Peter Lang, 2016, co-authored with Drs Terry Moore, Carol Pybus and David Moltow. Forthcoming (with Dr Murray Johnson) is a revised edition of the Historical Dictionary of Australian Aborigines (2019).

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Russo Katherine E

Alter/Natives Climate Change Justice: Risk Communication and Legal Mining Conflicts in Australian News and Literary Discourse

The evaluation of environmental risk often leads to conflict and legal disputes since risks are “threats to outcomes that we value. Defining risk means specifying those valued outcomes clearly enough to make choices about them” (Fischhoff and Kadvani 2011: 22). Yet while some outcomes, such as car mortality, are defined as risks, other outcomes such as climate change are contested and their measurement often leads to legal controversies. As Latour famously pointed out, the definition and evaluation of environmental risks is far from being stable and unproblematic (Latour, 1987). The paper provides an analysis of the recontextualisation and appraisal of Indigenous Australian Climate Justice in a media genre chain (New and Old News media, and Literature) regarding the instalment of coal megamines. The analysis will be carried out by analysing a corpus, specifically compiled to represent different interrelated media discourse genres. It is the contention of this paper that Indigenous Climate Change Justice stands as an opaque, alter/native discursive practice, which is often not taken into consideration in studies of climate change communication and literature. Far from being an exercise in environmental apocalypticism, itstands as a resistant trace that questions neo-colonial ideologies of development and the fiction of national progress, highlighting that its deterministic nature does not make it predictable, and revealing how chaos is not just incidental but central to ethics and ‘cosmopolitics’ as the potential trigger of encounter, connectivity and conviviality.

Katherine E. Russo, PhD University of New South Wales (Sydney), is Associate Professor at the University of Naples “L’Orientale”. Her research interests include Post-colonial, Whiteness and Gender Studies, Audiovisual and Translation Studies, Critical Discourse Analysis, and Media Discourse. She is the author of Practices of Proximity: The Appropriation of English in Australian Indigenous Literature (2010), which won the ESSE Book Award in 2012, of Global English, Transnational Flows: Australia and New Zealand in Translation (2012) and The Evaluation of Risk in Institutional and Newspaper Discourse: the Case of Climate Change and Migration (2018).

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Sawas Stéphane

Between Greece and Australia: Alter/Native Spaces of Cretan Music in A Family Affair by Angeliki Aristomenopoulou

In her second feature-length documentary A Family Affair (Greece-Australia, 2014), the director Angeliki Aristomenopoulou deals with intergenerational transmission of music in a Cretan family whose members live between Australia and Greece. Three generations of the famous Xylouris clan promote the Cretan traditional music alternately in Australia and in Crete, both places considered as island-continents. The children are born to an Australian mother and a Greek father. This identity-related tension, enhanced by the coexistence of Australian English and Cretan Greek, is therefore infranational as well as diasporic. Their repertoire evolves through first, an intergenerational dialogue with defenders of the tradition (father, grandfather) and second, an intercultural dialogue with musicians who feel alien to such musical tradition like the Australian percussionist Jim White. In addition, Aristomenopoulou underlines the fact that women take possession of a music which was originally strictly for men. Thus, Cretan music undergoes a renewal as it is decentred and polycentric. In this documentary, Cretan music reveals the multiple allegiances of Greek Australians and the hybridization of their musical practice.

Stéphane Sawas is Full Professor at the INALCO (Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales) in Paris. He is the Director of the CERLOM (Centre d’Étude et de Recherche sur les Littératures et les Oralités du Monde) and also teaches at the ENS (École Normale Supérieure). His research interests include Modern Greek History and Literature, Mediterranean Cinema and Music, Diasporic Cultures, especially in Australia. He is the author of the anthology Le Conseil de la cloche et autres nouvelles grecques (2d ed. 2015) and was awarded the Gold Medal of the Hellenic Society of Translators of Literature in 2013.

Sawas Stéphane

Between Greece and Australia: Alter/native spaces of the Cretan music in A Family Affair by Angeliki Aristomenopoulou

Dans son deuxième long métrage A Family Affair (Grèce-Australie, 2014), la documentariste Angeliki Aristomenopoulou se penche sur la transmission intergénérationnelle de la musique au sein d’une famille crétoise dont les membres vivent entre l’Australie et la Grèce. Trois générations du célèbre clan Xylouris, qui cultive et promeut la musique traditionnelle crétoise, y sont filmées alternativement en Crète et en Australie, qui se pensent chacune à sa manière comme une île-continent. Les espaces urbains (Melbourne) et ruraux (montagnes crétoises, outback australien) entrent en résonance à travers les plans d’ensemble qui scandent le film. Loin d’être figé, leur répertoire se transforme et évolue dans un entre-deux identitaire en se perpétuant auprès des jeunes générations. Australiens par leur mère et Grecs par leur père, les enfants insufflent en effet à leur pratique musicale une identité à la fois infranationale et diasporique d’une part dans un dialogue intergénérationnel avec les garants de la tradition (père et grand-père) et d’autre part dans un dialogue interculturel avec des musiciens étrangers à cette tradition comme le percussionniste australien Jim White. Cette tension entre un ici et un là-bas tant en Europe qu’en Australie est en outre renforcée par l’usage successif de l’anglais australien et du dialecte grec crétois, qui crée une intéressante distorsion spatio-temporelle. La réalisatrice souligne enfin combien les femmes s’approprient progressivement, dans ce nouveau contexte, cette musique traditionnellement réservée aux hommes. La musique crétoise se trouve ainsi renouvelée en ce qu’elle est décentrée et même polycentrique ; elle révèle la pluralité d’allégeances des Grecs Australiens et l’hybridation de leurs pratiques artistiques.

Stéphane est professeur des universités à l’INALCO (Paris) dont il dirige le CERLOM (Centre d’Étude et de Recherche sur les Littératures et les Oralités du Monde). Il est aussi chargé de cours à l’École Normale Supérieure. Ses travaux portent sur l’histoire du cinéma grec et sur les expressions littéraires et culturelles des Grecs en diaspora, en particulier en Australie. Il est notamment l’auteur de l’anthologie Le Conseil de la cloche et autres nouvelles grecques (éd. Rue d’Ulm, 2^e éd. 2015). Il a reçu en 2013 la Médaille d’Or de la Société Grecque des Traducteurs Littéraires.

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Schwarz Anja

Alter/Native Pasts in Berlin’s Natural History Museum

The past years have seen increasingly heated debates about the status of many of the collections held by European museums. This discussion has primarily focused on anthropological specimen from overseas with demands for the return of ancestral remains and sensitive objects of significant cultural value. The vast compilations of Australian flora and fauna held by European institutions, however, have only received scant attention to date. These plants and animals are habitually considered irrelevant in the struggle to redress the injustices and violence of the colonial past and continue to be treated as objects of biological information only.

My paper builds on research into the archive of field journals, research notes and publications by Prussian migrants – among them William Blandowski and Richard Schomburgk, who travelled to Australia in the middle of the nineteenth century to record and collect information about the continent’s natural history, and whose collections are now held by the Berlin Museum of Natural History. Alongside descriptive and taxonomical information on their collected specimen, these records contain important information on the oftentimes harsh and violent conditions that underpinned the production of knowledge in colonial Australia. They also show to what extent European knowledge production at the time depended on Indigenous collaborators as guides and “Australia’s first naturalists” (Russell and Ohlson 2019). A careful reading of these records, moreover, allows for important insights Indigenous life-worlds on the colonial frontier.

Dr Anja Schwarz is Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Potsdam, Germany. She has published on re-enactments, multicultural politics and the Australian beach as a postcolonial site of memory. Her most recent publication (with Lars Eckstein) discusses Tupaia’s Map, one of the most famous and enigmatic artefacts to emerge from eighteenth-century encounters between Europeans and Pacific Islanders.

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Schwegler-Castañer Astrid

“Help destroy one of Australia’s first fake news stories”: Deconstructing sensationalism in the interactive story(re)telling of the Eliza Fraser myth

The story of Eliza Fraser’s stay on K’gari —now known as Fraser island— in 1836 has been retold across genres in a way that supports the political ideologies of their time with long-lasting consequences (Schaffer 1994; Turcotte 1996). One of the most impactful of those genres was the captivity narrative, which typically recounts the sufferings of a white woman being held captive by an uncivilized other (Biber 2005, 634). The sensational aspects common to this kind of retelling such as cannibal claims were taken as anthropological truths, the repetition of which caused the story and those elements to gain “a kind of historical legitimacy in [their] perpetual re-telling” (Biber 2005, 634). The enduring influence of the story is captured by SBS’s launch in 2017 of the interactive documentary “K’gari”, whose aim is self-described as seeking to “erase the myth that influenced history” (SBS 2017).

Firstly, I will briefly cover how Eliza Fraser’s story was used to characterize the indigenous population as uncivilized with the portrayal of cannibalism and other stereotypes in a manner that justified colonialism. I will then analyse how those features are deconstructed in “K’gari” to establish a new interpretation of the past that resonates with a contemporary audience. I will do so by looking at the utilization of visual metaphors, juxtaposed perspectives, and the “illusion of interactivity” (Appelgren 2017) as persuasive tools for a journalistic construction of reality.

Astrid Schwegler-Castañer has a BA in English Philology and an MA in Modern Languages and Literatures from the University of the Balearic Islands. As a Predoctoral Research Fellow (FPU), she is working on her PhD thesis on the topic of culinary discourses and multiculturalism in Asian-Australian writing. She is also exploring how food is used in historical popular romance as part of the research project “The politics, aesthetics and marketing of literary formulae in popular women’s fiction: History, Exoticism and Romance.” She has published articles on the representation of foodways in international journals such as Continuum and Feminist Media Studies.

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Singeot Laura

The Museum, from a colonial institution to an alter/native space: the construction of the globalised subject

This paper aims at showing that while claiming their indigeneity in museums, Aboriginal contemporary artists have redefined their identities from subjects to agents since the 2000s. Indeed, subjects were reconstructed in literature in the 60s thanks to Aboriginal novels and writers, but another step was taken by museums which became the privileged “site of passage” from subjectivity to agentivity, thanks to new curatorial practices.

This redefinition of the role of museums, considered originally as colonial institutions, combined with the integration of contemporary art pieces in ethnographic exhibits lead to a redefinition of authenticity as well. In that case, authenticity shifts from what was at first described and considered as “native” ‒ following exoticized, occidental representations of Indigenous populations ‒ to its redefinition based on revendication and performance.

Focusing on specific artworks by Michael Cook, a photographer from Aboriginal descent, this paper will demonstrate that it is not so much about constructing an alter-native subject but as developing intersubjectivity thanks to diverse new practices focusing on the very redefinition of space: the subject in the museum becomes globalized. In the museum the subject-agent does not exist per se, but it evolves in a world of relations, linking for example the artistic subject-agents to the audience: the museum best embodies this evolution as it becomes the place where intersubjectivity reigns.

Laura Singeot has just defended her PhD dissertation under the supervision of Professor Françoise Kral (Université Paris Nanterre) and teaches English in an “Institut Universitaire de Technologie” in the South of Paris. She wrote her dissertation on the representations of indigeneity from the first accounts of explorers to contemporary literatures from Australia and New-Zealand, focusing on Mudrooroo’s tetralogy Master of the Ghost Dreaming, and Alan Duff’s trilogy, Once Were Warriors. Her PhD thesis ends on the appearance of new representations and on the study of museology and visual arts, showing how today’s curatorial and artistic practices have redefined the whole relation to indigeneity in the global sphere and even led to a redefinition of culture. She has also published articles on indigenous literatures («An Odyssey into the ‘Black Pacific’: A Reassessment of Mudrooroo’s The Undying », Commonwealth, Essays and Studies, 2014) and on the representation of Australian history in contemporary Australian fiction, focusing on the historical figure of George Augustus Robinson as depicted in Mudrooroo’s tetralogy (« Des carnets de G. A. Robinson aux romans de Mudrooroo : la figure de l’Indigène en marge de l’histoire australienne », E-rea, 14.2, 2016).

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Wergin Carsten

‘Nowhere Else But Here’, Indigenous Tourism Experiences as Alter/Native Spaces of Co-Becoming

Two of the most prominent Indigenous tourism experiences in the Kimberley region of Northwest Australia are the multi-award winning Kooljaman at Cape Leveque of the Bardi Jawi communities and the Lurujarri Heritage Trail, which has been run annually since 1987 by the Goolarabooloo. The gateway to the Kimberley is the town of Broome, well known for its pearling history and unique Kriol culture that has brought about such iconic products as the movie Bran Nue Dae or the internationally acclaimed Pigram Brothers. In their 1997 album those describe Broome and the Kimberley as a place ‘Nowhere else but here’. In my presentation I will draw on this imaginary and how Indigenous tourism experiences cater for both non-Indigenous and Indigenous travellers to become part of it.

Based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2011 and 2018, I discuss the qualities of Indigenous tourism experiences like Kooljaman and the Lurujarri Heritage Trail and how those differ from conventional tourist engagements with local people and environments. Drawing on the work of anthropologist Elisabeth Povinelli, I will argue that participation in them offers tourists and travellers means to permeate a place with their labour and sweat, and ultimately to become part of the land themselves. Thus, by walking the land, sharing story, and participating in daily activities ‘on country’, Indigenous tourism experiences offer aesthetic means to rethinking Australian society in collaborative terms and beyond the late-liberal logics of settler-colonialism.

Carsten Wergin (Dr. phil) is Research Group Leader in Transcultural Studies at the University of Heidelberg (Germany) and co-chairperson of the German Association for Australian Studies (GASt). His anthropological works at the intersections of heritage, culture and ecology have resulted in journal articles for, among others, Australian Humanities Review, Ethnos: Journal of Anthropology, and Journal of Cultural Economy. Further publications include the Special Journal Issue Materialities of Tourism (with Stephen Muecke, 2014), and The Call of the Trumpet Shell (with Corinna Erckenbrecht, 2018), a monograph on German anatomist and explorer Hermann Klaatsch (1863–1916) and his work in the Kimberley.

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Williams Michael

Is the applicant of European (white) race or decent?

Today’s multicultural Australia was a long time in the making, especially when considered that it was preceded by a concerted effort to establish a “white Australia”. Part of this journey to a multicultural Australia via a white Australia involved defining not only what “white” meant but also what was “European”. By examining the Immigration files generated during the period of the Dictation Test (1901-1958) it is possible to trace the many layered and evolving meanings of the concepts of “white” and “European” as they were applied to people originating in and near Europe within the context of Australia’s desire to allow immigration but only of “desirables”. How to treat “undesirables”, even when they were as “core” European in Australian eyes as people who were British in origin was an issue that ranged from the administrative to the political to the public. This paper, based on a chapter to appear in a forthcoming history of the Dictation Test, discusses how efforts to categorise people for the purposes of maintaining a white Australia grew increasingly fraught as pragmatic and individual concerns intersected with the legal and bureaucratic. The paper concludes that this period covering the height and beginning of the decline of the white Australia policy is important to understanding the gradual growth of a multicultural Australia.

Michael Williams is a graduate of Hong Kong University, a scholar of Chinese-Australian history and a founding member of the Chinese-Australian Historical Society. He is the author of Returning Home with Glory (HKU Press, 2018), which traces the history of peoples from south China’s Pearl River Delta around the Pacific Ports of Sydney, Hawaii and San Francisco. Michael has taught at Beijing Foreign Studies and Peking Universities and is currently an Adjunct Fellow at Western Sydney University. His current research includes the Dictation Test, early Chinese Opera in Australia and a history of the Chinese in Australia.

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Zhiqing Li

The Participation of Chinese migrants in Australian politics and its discontent

From the 1850s to the 1970s, Chinese laborers are marginalized for low education and English proficiency, coupled with limited population. However, with the implementation of multiculturalism, drastic change has taken place in the population of Chinese migrants. Along with economic and educational improvement, they are no longer marginalized group. Take the recent establishment of Liberal Party Chinese Youth Council for example, more and more young Chinese Australians have come to realize the significance of participating in politics and started to safeguard their own interests and the interests of community. Moreover, in the latest 2019 Australian federal election, for the first time in the history of Australia, two Chinese-Australian candidates participated in federal election simultaneously. The candidates Jennifer Yang (Taiwan, China background) and Gladys Liu (HKSAR, China background) run for the Chisholm constituency (20% of Chinese) by respectively representing the Australian Labor Party and the Liberal Party of Australia; and in the NSW state election, 26-year-old Scott Yung also ran for the Kogarah constituency in Sydney (50% Chinese). The common philosophy shared by them is that other communities are as essential as Australian Chinese community in the constituency. The Chinese-Australian candidates from various backgrounds like China, Malaysia, Indonesia, etc. are to devote to serving every ethnic group regardless of color and religion, demonstrating that Australia is a multicultural society. Hence one can see that the participation of Chinese migrants in Australian politics can not only speak for Australian Chinese community and other minority communities to strive for equal rights, but also serve the constituencies, the entire community, in the reflection of pluralism of their political participation.

Li Zhiqing is a ma candidate from East China Normal University. She was a delegate of the Australia-China Emerging Leaders Summit (ACELS 8) and a Chinese-English translator of the International Tourism Boerse (ITB China). She has participated in the Global Professional Program of Monash University, Melbourne, Australia in 2017, and attended the 6^th Foundation for Australian Studies in China Conference where she received FASIC Outstanding Award in 2018. She is interested in cross-cultural and psychological research regarding the Sino-Australian relations, with the hope that the interaction and understanding of two distinct cultures may promote the development of bilateral relations.